Dennis Witcher

The band grew out of the 1984 Strawberry Music Festival in Yosemite. There his six-year-old son Gabe was invited on stage by Bill Monroe, and father and son were then asked to play three songs on the main stage between acts. With Dennis singing lead, playing mandolin and writing many of the band’s best-known songs, several of them with the guitarist and tenor singer Tony Recupido, who joined in 1996, the Witcher Brothers recorded Yesterday’s News (1995), Finding the Way (1997) and Like a Picture (2000) for the Elk Dog label. Mike Witcher took up the Dobro at fourteen and joined his father and brother in the band within a year.

After the Witcher Brothers disbanded, Witcher kept performing with Recupido as Witcher and Recupido. The two then formed a Los Angeles band with the clawhammer banjo player Dan Levitt, billed as Witcher, Recupido and Levitt. He has played with other bluegrass bands around Los Angeles, and more recently he formed Dennis Witcher and the Brew with younger Los Angeles musicians, among them the fiddler Adam Moss, Smith Allen, Liam Lewis, the guitarist Andy Keathley and the banjo player Jordan Katz.