Del McCoury

He was born Delano Floyd McCoury on 1 February 1939 in Bakersville, North Carolina, and named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1941 the family moved to York County, Pennsylvania. His mother, Hazel, sang and played organ, piano and harmonica, and his older brother G. C. taught him guitar and introduced him to the music of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. It was Scruggs’s playing that made him a banjo player, and he spent several years with Keith Daniels & the Blue Ridge Ramblers, regulars on the New Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Virginia.

After stints with Melvin Howell’s Franklin County Boys and Jack Cooke’s Virginia Mountain Boys, he joined Monroe in February 1963. He had been hired to play banjo, but Monroe had just taken on Bill Keith, so Del moved to guitar and lead vocals, and he has stayed on guitar ever since. In his year with Monroe he played the Grand Ole Opry and recorded six songs for Decca, among them “Roll On, Buddy, Roll On,” cut in Nashville on 28 January 1964, on which Del sings the lead on the choruses.

When he left Monroe in February 1964 he went to California with the fiddler Billy Baker to play with the Golden State Boys, whose members included Chris Hillman, and then with the Shady Valley Boys. By the end of June he was back in Pennsylvania, logging for his father and playing clubs on the side. In December 1967 he made his first album under his own name, Del McCoury Sings Bluegrass, for Arhoolie, with Billy Baker on fiddle and Bill Emerson on banjo.

He formed the Dixie Pals in 1969, with his brother Jerry on bass, and recorded with them for independent labels: High on a Mountain (Rounder, 1973), whose title song came from Ola Belle Reed, and the Rebel albums Del McCoury (1975) and Our Kind of Grass (1978). A new lineup with Herschel Sizemore on mandolin toured Japan in 1979, and Rebel later released Sawmill (1985). His sons came into the band in the 1980s, Ronnie on mandolin in 1981 and Robbie on bass in 1986, moving to banjo in the spring of 1987. That same year Del began a decade with Rounder, starting with The McCoury Brothers, made with Jerry, and by the end of the 1980s the group had become the Del McCoury Band.

The band moved to Nashville in 1992. Its Rounder albums Don’t Stop the Music, Blue Side of Town and A Deeper Shade of Blue led to a run of IBMA awards, and through the 1990s Del was named Male Vocalist four times and the band Entertainer of the Year five times. Recording The Mountain with Steve Earle (1999) took them to audiences beyond bluegrass, and those audiences grew with the Down From the Mountain tour, Bonnaroo in 2002 and onstage jams with Phish.

After two albums for Ricky Skaggs’s Ceili label, The Family (1999) and Del and the Boys (2001), he started his own label, McCoury Music, in 2003, the same year he joined the Opry. Its releases include It’s Just the Night, The Promised Land and American Legacies, made with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The band won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album with The Company We Keep at the 48th Grammys in 2006, and again with The Streets of Baltimore at the 56th, in 2014. Del received a National Heritage Fellowship in 2010 and entered the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2011, and the band’s tenth IBMA Entertainer of the Year award came in 2024.

DelFest, his own festival, began on 23–25 May 2008 at the Allegany County Fairgrounds in Cumberland, Maryland, a site he chose himself. As of 2026 it is still held there each Memorial Day weekend, with the Del McCoury Band as host.