Chad Cromwell
Chad Cromwell is a drummer who has recorded and toured with Joe Walsh, Neil Young, Mark Knopfler and Peter Frampton, and who has worked as a session drummer in Nashville since 1990. His country and acoustic credits include LeAnn Rimes’s Blue, Vince Gill’s records and Earl Scruggs’s Earl Scruggs and Friends.
He was born on 14 June 1957 in Paducah, Kentucky, and moved with his family to Memphis three years later. A week after finishing high school he moved to London to join two other Memphis musicians in a trio, Lash LaRoo, which was signed in the mid-1970s by Elton John’s new Rocket Records label. The band made a record but soon broke up, and Cromwell came home to play the clubs again.
He began recording and touring with Joe Walsh in 1986 and played on Walsh’s Got Any Gum? (1987) and Ordinary Average Guy (1991). In 1987 he started working with Neil Young. Those sessions became Neil Young & the Bluenotes, heard on This Note’s for You (1988), and he went on to play on Young’s Freedom (1989), Prairie Wind (2005), Living with War (2006), Chrome Dreams II (2007) and Fork in the Road (2009). He appears in Jonathan Demme’s concert film Heart of Gold, shot at the Ryman Auditorium, and toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the summer of 2006.
In 1990 he moved to Nashville and built a session career while continuing to tour. He played on Joan Baez’s Play Me Backwards (1992) and LeAnn Rimes’s debut Blue (1996), and in 1994 he played the U.S. leg of Bonnie Raitt’s Longing in Their Hearts tour, filling in for Ricky Fataar. He recorded and toured with Mark Knopfler from Knopfler’s first solo albums: Golden Heart (1996), Sailing to Philadelphia (2000), The Ragpicker’s Dream (2002) and Shangri-La (2004), and Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’s All the Roadrunning (2006). By 2005 he had also been in Peter Frampton’s band for six years, playing on Now (2003) and Fingerprints (2006), and he drummed on Vince Gill’s Next Big Thing (2003), These Days (2006) and Guitar Slinger (2011).
In 2004 he was a founding member of Fortunate Sons, a band with Michael Rhodes, Gary Nicholson, Kenny Greenberg and Reese Wynans that released a self-titled album that year. His later studio credits include the Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012), Bob Seger’s Ride Out (2014), a run of Gary Allan albums from It Would Be You (1998) to Set You Free (2013), and Dierks Bentley’s Gravel & Gold (2023).
His bluegrass credit is “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues” on Earl Scruggs and Friends (MCA, 2001), recorded at Scruggs Sound Studio in Nashville with Earl Scruggs on banjo, Randy Scruggs on guitar, Glen Duncan on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Glenn Worf on bass and John Fogerty singing.
