Brent Truitt

He was playing in Nashville studios by the late 1980s. He played mandolin on Alison Krauss and Union Station’s Two Highways (Rounder, 1989), recorded at Nashville SoundConnection with Krauss on fiddle, Jeff White on guitar, Mike Harman on banjo, John Pennell on bass and Jerry Douglas on Dobro, and was one of the “other pluckers” behind the Nashville group the Cluster Pluckers, with Blaine Sprouse on fiddle and Richard Bailey on banjo. His other mandolin work of the period includes records by Holly Dunn, the fiddlers Randy Howard and Blaine Sprouse, Kathy Chiavola and Riders in the Sky.

Through the 1990s and 2000s he combined session work with production and engineering. He engineered and mixed Blue Highway’s Midnight Storm (Rebel, 1998) and mixed albums by the Lonesome River Band and Sammy Shelor, and recorded Josh Williams’s first solo album, Now That You’re Gone (Pinecastle, 2001), at his studio. He produced Jon Randall’s Willin’ (1999) and David Grier’s Hootenanny (1998) and Evocative (2009), a run of Special Consensus albums from 25th Anniversary (2000) and Route 10 (Pinecastle, 2002), which he also recorded and mixed, to 35 (2011), the Lovell Sisters’ Time to Grow (2009), Nora Jane Struthers’ first album and Carnival (2013), and Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen’s first album (2010) and On the Edge (Compass, 2013). He played mandolin on the Dixie Chicks’ Top of the World Tour – Live (2003) and appears on Dolly Parton’s Halos & Horns (2002).

When the founding mandolinist Mike Henderson left the SteelDrivers in December 2011, Truitt took his place. With Gary Nichols singing, the band made Hammer Down (Rounder, 2013), which Truitt also helped record and mix, and The Muscle Shoals Recordings (2015), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. He played mandolin and baritone guitar on Bad for You (Rounder, 2020) and is on the band’s first gospel album, Tougher Than Nails (2023). As of 2026 he is still the band’s mandolinist, alongside Richard Bailey, Tammy Rogers, Mike Fleming and Matt Dame.

In 2016 his studio was the home of Casey Campbell’s Mandolin Duets, Volume One, which he engineered. More recently he co-produced and recorded Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’s I Built a World (2024), which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and co-produced, engineered and mixed her Rattlin’ Bones (2026), made partly at his Nashville studio.