Colby Laney

He played bluegrass with members of his family as a teenager, and at seventeen won a performance scholarship to the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University; a year later he made his first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. While at ETSU he worked with Next Best Thing, a band that included Rhonda Vincent’s daughters Sally and Tensel, and with Glenn Harrell’s Volume Five.

In May 2012 he became the guitarist of the Larry Stephenson Band, and Stephenson noted that he now had two ETSU players, Laney and the bassist Danny Stewart. That October Volume Five released his “Rich Man’s Daughter,” sung by Harrell, about a poor suitor who runs off with a rich man’s girl only for her to miss the life she left; it reached number one in 2013. With Stephenson, Kenny Ingram and Stewart, and Aubrey Haynie on fiddle, he recorded the gospel album Pull Your Savior In (2014).

In September 2014 he went back to Volume Five, saying the band gave him more creative input and a place for his songs; he re-tracked guitar on the album then being finished at Mountain Fever’s studio in Willis, Virginia, and that album, Voices (January 2015), carried his “Going Across the Mountain” and the guitar instrumental “Sam’s Gap.” On Drifter (2016) he contributed “Alaskan Gold” and the album’s one instrumental, “Lucky Seven.” He left Volume Five in January 2019 after four years, his second stint with the band, and kept playing daily at Ole Smoky Moonshine in Gatlinburg, where he had worked for some time.

He produced the mandolinist Darren Nicholson’s album Wanderer (2023), on which he also plays guitar and sings harmony, and in July 2023 signed with Sound Biscuit Records in Sevierville. With Danielle Bishop, a fiddle champion at Galax and Fiddlers Grove, he formed Laney & Bishop, whose debut single, “Bright Sunny South,” came out on Sound Biscuit in June 2024. Their later releases include Laney’s instrumental “B Funky” (2025), with Aaron Ramsey, Jeff Partin and Jacob Burleson, and the instrumental “Gee, Let’s Run” (2026).