Caleb Smith
Caleb Smith is the guitarist and one of the lead singers of Balsam Range, the Haywood County, North Carolina, band he helped found in 2007, and a guitar builder whose instruments have been played by Bryan Sutton, Zac Brown and Trey Hensley. Balsam Range was named the IBMA’s Entertainer of the Year in 2014 and 2018.
He was born in Asheville and grew up in Haywood County, and he names his father, the pastor Steve Smith, and both his grandfathers as his first musical influences. His father, a woodworker and fingerstyle guitarist, bought him the Martin D-35 he learned on. Hearing Tony Rice’s records helped set his course; he learned flatpicking and joined local jams, and his first professional job was with the Smoky Mountain Boys, a bluegrass gospel group from Bryson City. In his early twenties he and several friends formed Harvest, a band that set out to share the gospel through bluegrass. At the 2006 PowerGrass Bluegrass Gospel Music Awards Harvest won Album of the Year for John 4:35 and Song of the Year for Jimmy Owens’s “He Wouldn’t Stay Dead,” and Smith was named Male Vocalist and Guitarist of the Year. Three of his own songs reached the Singing News charts.
Balsam Range was formed in 2007 by five friends living in Haywood County: Smith on guitar and vocals, Buddy Melton on fiddle, Marc Pruett on banjo, Tim Surrett on bass and Darren Nicholson on mandolin. On the band’s first album, Marching Home (Mountain Home, October 2007), Smith sang lead on Jerry Salley and Jim Rushing’s “I’m Just as Wrong” and on “The Boat of Love,” and on Last Train to Kitty Hawk (2009) he sang lead on Chris Stapleton’s “Somewhere in Between.” The band went on to Trains I Missed (2010) and Papertown (2012), and the IBMA gave it Album of the Year in 2013 and 2017, Song of the Year in 2011 and 2015, Vocal Group of the Year in 2014 and 2015 and Entertainer of the Year in 2014 and 2018. When Nicholson left, Alan Bibey took over the mandolin from 2023, and after Melton announced his departure in January 2025, Smith, Surrett, Pruett and Bibey carried on; for 2026 dates they were joined by Stephen Hudson on fiddle.
Smith had worked as a building contractor from 2006 to 2008, and when the housing crash ended that work he came home, gave guitar lessons and, in 2007, using the guitar-making book his father had once used to build a classical guitar, began building guitars of his own. Wanting an instrument to take on the road in place of his vintage 1940 Martin D-18 and 1944 D-28, he built one for himself, and once he played it on stage the orders followed. Bryan Sutton, who grew up about thirty miles from him, asked him for a guitar, and he built two for Zac Brown; by 2016 he had also built four guitars of black locust, a local wood, one of them for Trey Hensley.
