Colton Crawford

Musician

Colton Crawford is the banjo player in the Dead South, the string band from Regina, Saskatchewan, that he started in 2012 with Nate Hilts, Scott Pringle and Danny Kenyon. He was away from the band from 2015 to 2018 and was back for Sugar & Joy, which won the 2020 Juno Award for Traditional Roots Album of the Year.

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The band grew out of Hilts and Kenyon’s idea, in 2012, for a stomping bluegrass band; Crawford joined them learning the banjo, and Pringle the mandolin. In his first stretch he was in the band for its first EP, The Ocean Went Mad and We Were to Blame (2013), and its first album, Good Company (Devil Duck Records, 2014), which led to long tours of Canada and Europe. He left in 2015, and the studio musician Eliza Mary Doyle took over the banjo while he was away.

Crawford came back for the “Voices in Your Head” tour in mid-2018. With him the band went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to make Sugar & Joy with the producer Jimmy Nutt, released by Six Shooter Records in 2019; it was followed by two EPs of cover songs, Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1 and Part 2 (2022), and Chains & Stakes (2024), recorded with Nutt at Panoram Studio in Mexico City.

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