Don Rigsby

He was born Donald Glen Rigsby on 18 February 1968 and grew up singing with his family. At five he learned to sing from a 1959 tape of Ralph Stanley performing “Hills of Home” and “Little Maggie,” and for his sixth birthday he was taken to see Stanley at the Paramount Arts Center in Ashland, Kentucky, where Keith Whitley lifted him onto his shoulders and carried him backstage to meet Stanley. Whitley came from Elliott County too, and Ricky Skaggs is Rigsby’s cousin. He took up the guitar at twelve and later added mandolin, fiddle and dulcimer.

At Morehead State University he played mandolin in TruGrass, with Johnie Lewis on banjo and Tim Gilliam on guitar, and from 1987 he spent two years in Charlie Sizemore’s band, working his way through college. After graduating in 1990 he moved to Nashville and joined Vern Gosdin’s road band. His first national exposure in bluegrass came with the Bluegrass Cardinals, from 1991 to 1993, and he then played mandolin with J. D. Crowe and the New South from 1993 to 1995, on Crowe’s Rounder album Flashback with Richard Bennett, Phil Leadbetter and Curt Chapman.

When Dan Tyminski left the Lonesome River Band, Rigsby took his place, and in six years with Ronnie Bowman, Sammy Shelor and Kenny Smith he recorded One Step Forward (1996), Finding the Way (1998) and Talkin’ to Myself (2000) for Sugar Hill. At the same time he sang with Longview, a band formed with Dudley Connell and James King, with Joe Mullins on banjo, Glen Duncan on fiddle and Marshall Wilborn on bass, in which he and Connell sang Stanley-style harmony behind King. Their Rounder albums Longview (1997) and High Lonesome (1999) were followed by Lessons in Stone (Rebel, 2002); in 1998 Longview was the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year and its “Lonesome Old Home” Song of the Year. A later Longview lineup, with Lou Reid, J. D. Crowe, Ron Stewart and Wilborn, made Deep in the Mountains (Rounder, 2008). After John Duffey’s death in 1996 Rigsby also filled in with the Seldom Scene.

His first solo album, the gospel set A Vision (Sugar Hill, 1998), with J. D. Crowe, Ralph Stanley, Sammy Shelor, Roy Huskey Jr. and Ricky Skaggs, won the Association for Independent Music’s Gospel Album of the Year. Empty Old Mailbox (Sugar Hill, 2000) followed, its title song the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America’s Song of the Year in 2001, and then The Midnight Call (Sugar Hill, 2003). With Dudley Connell he made two albums of brother-duet singing, Meet Me by the Moonlight (Sugar Hill, 1999), with Ronnie Simpkins on bass, and Another Saturday Night (Sugar Hill, 2001). He also sang on the IBMA’s 1998 Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year, Stanley Gospel Tradition: Songs About Our Savior, and received the 1999 Bluegrass Now Fans’ Choice award for Vocal Tenor of the Year and the 2001 Governor’s Kentucky Star Award.

In 2001 he returned to Morehead State as the first full-time director of its Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, where he taught vocal harmony for the traditional music minor and organized classes, workshops, concerts and school tours; he also remastered a series of old local radio shows by Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley for release on Sugar Hill. In 2010 he left the post to work in music full time. Meanwhile he led Rock County (2001–2004) and, from 2006, Midnight Call, whose first album was Hillbilly Heartache (Rebel, 2006). As producer of Larry Sparks’s 40 he shared the IBMA’s 2005 Album and Recorded Event of the Year awards, and he took part in the 2006 Album of the Year, Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer.

Rebel released Doctor’s Orders: A Tribute to Ralph Stanley in 2013, with Stanley himself and his former sidemen Larry Sparks, Ricky Skaggs, Charlie Sizemore, Steve Sparkman and James Alan Shelton. That year Rigsby also sang on Alan Jackson’s The Bluegrass Album and appeared with Jackson on the Late Show with David Letterman. He played mandolin in Band of Ruhks, with Ronnie Bowman and Kenny Smith, on its first album in 2015, and in 2016 he formed Flashback with Bennett, Leadbetter and Chapman, his bandmates from Crowe’s 1990s New South. His other honors include two Grammy nominations and two SPBGMA Traditional Male Vocalist of the Year awards, and he contributed vocals to a Grammy-winning album by John Fogerty. In 2025 Rebel issued a collection of his recordings, Kentucky Troubadour.