Bryn Bright
Bryn Davies is a bass player and singer from Livermore, California, who recorded early in her career as Bryn Bright. She played bass in Peter Rowan’s band from 1999, on Old & In the Gray (2002), and in the Peter Rowan & Tony Rice Quartet, and later worked in Nashville with Guy Clark, Patty Griffin, Justin Townes Earle and Jack White.
She was studying jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in the mid-1990s when the mandolinist Billy Bright and the guitarist Brian Smith, who lived upstairs, invited her to play bass at one of their nightly jams. She had never played bluegrass before. That night was the start of the Two High String Band, which had a regular weekend job in Boston by the fall of 1995. After college the three moved south, playing in Florida and Colorado before settling in Austin, Texas. She and Billy Bright married in 2001 and recorded as Billy & Bryn Bright, and the Two High String Band, with Geoff Union added on guitar, released its first album, Insofarasmuch, in 2003.
The Brights met Peter Rowan in Austin and on the road, played with him at the Old Settler’s Music Festival in 1999, and by that fall were his regular band, the Texas Trio. With Rowan they played the Grand Ole Opry and toured with Tony Rice, the David Grisman Quartet and others. She played bass on Rowan’s Reggaebilly! and on Old & In the Gray (Acoustic Disc, 2002), a reunion of Old & In the Way with Rowan, David Grisman and Vassar Clements and with Herb Pedersen on banjo, in which she took the bass chair once held by John Kahn.
As Bryn Davies she joined the Tony Rice Unit and the quartet Rice led with Rowan. On the quartet’s album Quartet (Rounder, January 2007), recorded at Bias Studios in Springfield, Virginia, she played bass and sang tenor and harmony alongside Sharon Gilchrist on mandolin. Her studio work from the mid-2000s includes albums by Guy Clark (Workbench Songs, Somedays the Song Writes You, My Favorite Picture of You), Justin Townes Earle, Jim Lauderdale and Patty Griffin, and she played on Jack White’s Blunderbuss (2012) and Lazaretto (2014). In 2012 she was the bassist in the Peacocks, the all-female band White took on tour for Blunderbuss.
