Bradford Lee Folk
Bradford Lee Folk is a singer, guitarist and songwriter who fronted Open Road, a Fort Collins, Colorado, band that recorded three albums for Rounder between 2002 and 2005, and who later led Bradford Lee Folk and the Bluegrass Playboys out of Nashville. A high tenor raised in Missouri, he built Open Road on the sound of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin.
Folk grew up listening to bluegrass in Missouri and settled in Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University, where he worked on cattle ranches and dairy farms and played in a number of local bands. He has credited Ken Seaman, the banjo player who founded the Bluegrass Patriots, with building the traditional bluegrass scene there.
In the late 1990s he teamed up with the mandolin player Caleb Roberts, an electrical engineer from Columbia, South Carolina, who had been a founding member of the alt-country band Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. They named Open Road after a model of Stetson hat, and with the bassist Ben O’Connor, the fiddler Jean Ballhorn and the banjo player Mark Leslie, later replaced by Jim Runnels, they played the old songs in matching suits and hats while other Colorado bands were adding electric instruments and drums. Sally Van Meter produced their self-titled debut in 2000, which mixed old bluegrass covers with several of Folk’s own songs. The International Bluegrass Music Association nominated Open Road for its Emerging Artist award in 2001 and again in 2002.
Rounder released Cold Wind in October 2002, with Folk as the band’s guitarist, main lead singer and songwriter, and with Eddie Stubbs, formerly of the Johnson Mountain Boys, sitting in on fiddle for one cut. That year the band made its first East Coast tour, playing the Labor Day festivals in New Jersey and Maine, with Eric Thorin now on bass and Robert Britt on fiddle. In the Life (May 2004) had Folk, Roberts, Thorin and Britt with Keith Reed on banjo, and on Lucky Drive (July 2005) Paul Lee took over the fiddle, with Vern Williams singing tenor and Sally Van Meter harmony on one song each.
Folk then left Open Road and the road to open the Swing Station, a honky-tonk in Laporte, northwest of Fort Collins. By 2014 he had moved to Nashville, where he worked on an organic vegetable farm on the Cumberland River and formed Bradford Lee Folk and the Bluegrass Playboys, a band that took a looser approach to bluegrass and reached into Americana and folk. Their eight-song album Somewhere Far Away (2014) featured Robert Trapp on banjo, Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle, David Goldenberg on mandolin and Ashleigh Caudill and John Fabke on bass. In February 2015 the band recorded a session at Second Story Garage in Boulder, playing “The Lion’s Den,” “Denver” and “Soil and Clay,” which Folk wrote in response to the Sandy Hook school shooting.
