Curt Chapman

Musician · Lancaster, Ohio
Best known for Bass

Curt Chapman held the bass chair in J.D. Crowe and the New South for roughly fifteen years and then co-founded Wildfire, which means most of his working life was spent inside two of the most rhythmically exacting bands in bluegrass.

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  • Born in Lancaster, Ohio, and raised in Nashville, he moved to Richmond, Kentucky in 1973 and stayed.
  • He took up the upright bass at twelve.
  • He was the New South’s bassist from 1987 to around 2000, playing behind Crowe’s banjo — a job defined by keeping time with a player whose own time was famously immovable.
  • He is on the Crowe albums Flashback and Come On Down to My World.
  • He co-founded Wildfire with Robert Hale in 2000 and stayed with the band until retiring from touring in 2025.
  • In this catalog he appears on New South and Wildfire recordings from the 1990s and early 2000s.

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