Brent Burke

Raised by his grandparents, John and Doris O’Rear, he started on guitar at five; his grandfather raised the strings on a standard guitar so the boy could play it like a Dobro, using a socket wrench as a slide. He learned by ear from cassettes of Josh Graves, whose music he studied from the age of seven, and an uncle built him his first real Dobro in 1997. With his three siblings he played in the family’s Bluegrass Special Band, which their grandparents took around Alabama.

He declared the new bluegrass major at ETSU in spring 2010, when the program first offered it, and he also played in Next Best Thing, a band formed by Rhonda Vincent’s daughters Sally and Tensel. Vincent added him to the Rage in November 2011, making the band a six-piece. He made his Grand Ole Opry debut with her on December 10, 2011, a week before he graduated, and his Dobro was added to a revised edition of her album Taken that December.

With the Rage he recorded the concert album All the Rage: In Concert, Volume One, released in November 2016 on Vincent’s Upper Management label after a recording at Bethel University in McKenzie, Tennessee. It tied with the Infamous Stringdusters’ Laws of Gravity for Best Bluegrass Album at the Grammys in January 2018, the first win for Vincent and for every member of the Rage. In 2015 he began gathering material for a solo project in tribute to Graves, recording on vintage Regal and Dobro guitars given to him by the son of a resonator player. He announced in December 2019 that he would leave the Rage on December 17, eight years to the day after joining, to spend more time at home.