Dennis Crouch

He grew up in a musical family in Strawberry and started playing bass at eight. With his father and his brother, the fiddler Tim Crouch, he played in a family band that won the Arkansas State Fiddlers Championship five times and the national championship twice; Tim went on to play with Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys. Among the bass players Dennis counts as models are Ray Brown, Roy Huskey Jr. and Bob Moore.

After moving to Nashville in 1996 he struggled at first to find enough work, until a phone call led to a place on the Down From the Mountain tour and to sessions with Ralph Stanley, T Bone Burnett, Plant and Krauss, Gregg Allman, Costello and Lynn. In 1998 he was one of the founders of the Time Jumpers, a band of Nashville session players whose Monday-night shows at the Station Inn were built on three fiddles; with Kenny Sears, Dawn Sears, “Ranger Doug” Green and Paul Franklin, among others, it made the live Jumpin’ Time (2007), which drew two Grammy nominations, and a self-titled studio album in 2012. He left the band that year.

His studio work in these years included the double bass on Ralph Stanley’s self-titled album for DMZ and Columbia (2002); eight tracks of June Carter Cash’s Wildwood Flower (Dualtone, 2003), which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in 2004; and every track of Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007), produced by Burnett, which was named Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammys. In 2013 the IBMA named “Foggy Mountain Rock,” recorded by Tom Adams, Dan Tyminski, Ron Stewart, Crouch, Clay Hess and Randy Kohrs, its Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year. In 2021 he played on six Bob Dylan recordings, among them “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Not Dark Yet,” produced by Burnett for a one-time sale as Ionic Originals.

He and Tim have also recorded together as Tim Crouch & Dennis Crouch, releasing the single “Kentucky Turnpike” and the gospel album Hymn Time on the Engelhardt Music Group label. His credits also take in Elton John, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Vince Gill, the Chieftains, Steven Tyler, Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall.