David Parmley

His father had played the incidental banjo music on The Beverly Hillbillies and was working around Los Angeles when the Cardinals took shape. In May 1975 Don, David, the mandolinist Randy Graham and the bassist Bill Bryson won an audition to play at Busch Gardens in California; Don and Graham quit their jobs and David quit school. The band’s first album, The Bluegrass Cardinals (Briar, 1976), was recorded at Westlake Audio in Los Angeles in October 1975, with David on guitar singing lead on some songs and baritone on others, and in 1976 the band moved east to Virginia.

Through the late 1970s and the 1980s his voice led the band’s records, among them four for CMH: Livin’ in the Good Old Days (1978) and Cardinal Soul (1979), both cut at Arthur Smith Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina; the gospel album Sunday Mornin’ Singin’, recorded in Nashville in March 1980; and Where Rainbows Touch Down (1981). He and his father wrote songs together for several of them. He also made albums of his own, I Know a Good Thing (Sugar Hill, 1989) and Southern Heritage (Rebel, 1993), and Families of Tradition, which teamed Don and David with Del, Ronnie and Rob McCoury and the fiddler Warren Blair, was the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 1991. That year, by his own account, he left the Cardinals to go out on his own; his father kept the band going until 1997.

With the banjo player Scott Vestal he formed Parmley, Vestal & Continental Divide, whose first album, David Parmley, Scott Vestal and Continental Divide (Pinecastle, July 1995), had Jimmy Bowen on mandolin, Gail Rudisill on fiddle and Mike Anglin on bass, and the IBMA named the band its Emerging Artist of the Year in 1995. Billed later as David Parmley & Continental Divide, the band recorded There’ll Always Be a Rocking Chair (Pinecastle, 2000), Long Time Coming (CMH, 2005), Church House Hymns (2007) and Three Silver Dollars (Pinecastle, 2008). In between came What We Leave Behind (Pinecastle, 2001), cut at Hilltop Studios in Nashville, on which Del McCoury, Russell Moore, Steve Gulley and Larry Stephenson took turns singing tenor to his lead.

By 2016 he was back on stage with a band called Cardinal Tradition, and he now leads the David Parmley Band. In 2022 he and two former Cardinals, Randy Graham and Larry Stephenson, reunited for select shows as Bluegrass Cardinals Tribute, with Parmley on guitar, Graham on bass and Stephenson on mandolin. When the IBMA inducted the Bluegrass Cardinals into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in Chattanooga in 2025, Parmley, by then living in Berea, Kentucky, performed a medley of the band’s songs with former Cardinals Larry Stephenson, Dale Perry, Randy Graham and Warren Blair. His album So, What’d I Miss?, produced by Scott Vestal, has guest appearances from Del McCoury, Rob McCoury and Rhonda Vincent, and in October 2025 he was at work on a fiftieth-anniversary album of Bluegrass Cardinals songs for 615 Hideaway Records.