Dale Ann Bradley

Musician · Bell County, Kentucky · Also a recording artist
Best known for Lead Vocals Guitar

Dale Ann Bradley is a six-time IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year out of Bell County, Kentucky, and one of the few singers in the music whose phrasing is instantly identifiable — a mountain voice with a catch in it, applied as readily to Tom Petty as to a Ralph Stanley hymn.

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  • She grew up in Bell County in southeastern Kentucky, the daughter of a coal-mining Primitive Baptist minister, in a church where instruments were not permitted and the singing was unaccompanied — which is where the voice comes from.
  • The house had no running water or electricity until she was a senior in high school; she got her first guitar at fourteen and cut a pick out of a plastic milk carton.
  • Her first significant job was with the New Coon Creek Girls, the Renfro Valley band descended from the 1930s Coon Creek Girls, where she sang lead and played guitar for five years.
  • She went solo with East Kentucky Morning in 1997, the record that established the voice and the repertoire — traditional material alongside country and pop songs rebuilt as bluegrass.
  • The IBMA named her Female Vocalist of the Year six times: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012 and again in 2021, a decade after the first run.
  • She has twice been nominated for a Grammy.
  • She was a founding member of Sister Sadie, the all-woman group that won IBMA Entertainer of the Year in 2020 — the first all-woman band to take the award.
  • The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame inducted her, and she continues to record and tour with her own band.
  • In this catalog she appears on her own “In Despair,” “Ain’t it Funny” and “Our Last Goodbye,” with Sister Sadie on “Morning Sky,” and on Louisa Branscomb’s “Steel Rails.”

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