Drew Emmitt

He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and lived there until he was about twelve. There were always instruments in the house, and he started on guitar at twelve. In 1973 he moved to Boulder, where as a teenager he went to hear bands such as Hot Rize, took lessons from Hot Rize’s Tim O’Brien and began playing club dates. He picked up the mandolin at about eighteen, and after high school he went to the University of Colorado.

In 1984 he formed the Left Hand String Band, named after an area near Boulder; it released Get Me Out of This City in 1991. When Vince Herman arrived in Boulder from West Virginia in 1985, the two met on his first night in town at a Left Hand String Band show. At the end of 1989, when some of Herman’s Cajun-jug band, the Salmon Heads, would not travel to a New Year’s Eve job in Crested Butte, Herman took Emmitt and the band’s banjo player, Mark Vann, instead, and the name they joked about on the drive, Leftover Salmon, stuck.

With Herman, Emmitt, Vann and the drummer Michael Wooten at its core, Leftover Salmon played bluegrass with drums and electric instruments and mixed in Cajun music and rock, and it worked rock clubs as readily as bluegrass festivals. Its records of the 1990s included Bridges to Bert (1992); Ask the Fish (1995), recorded live at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, with “Rocky Road Blues” and “Hot Corn, Cold Corn”; Euphoria (Hollywood, 1997), with Sam Bush on fiddle and “Cash on the Barrelhead”; and The Nashville Sessions (1999), made with guests including Earl and Randy Scruggs, Del and Ronnie McCoury, Béla Fleck and Waylon Jennings. Vann died in March 2002, and the Compass album Live that year was dedicated to him. Emmitt described the self-titled Leftover Salmon (2004) as a fresh start without Vann, and after a New Year’s Eve show at the end of 2004 the band stopped performing.

His first solo album, Freedom Ride, came out on Compass on 9 April 2002, with Peter Rowan, Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements, Sam Bush and John Cowan, who played bass and sang harmony. Across the Bridge (Compass, 19 July 2005) had Ross Martin on guitar, Matt Flinner on banjo, mandolin and bouzouki and Greg Garrison on bass, with Stuart Duncan, Del and Ronnie McCoury and Cowan as guests, and opened with “All Night Ride,” one of several songs he wrote with Rob Galloway; Bob Dylan’s “Meet Me in the Morning” was among the covers. On Long Road (Compass, 15 July 2008), with Tyler Grant on guitar, Chris Pandolfi on banjo and Jeff Sipe on drums, he played mandolin and guitar.

In 2007, after playing a few days of shows with the String Cheese Incident, he and its guitarist Bill Nershi formed the Emmitt-Nershi Band, when Nershi took a break from his band and wanted a bluegrass side project. It released New Country Blues on SciFidelity in 2009, and by 2011 it was playing Telluride, MerleFest and other acoustic festivals; its banjo player Andy Thorn later joined Leftover Salmon. Leftover Salmon had come back in July 2007, and Emmitt and Herman have led it since, through Aquatic Hitchhiker (2012), High Country (2014), the three-disc live set 25, Something Higher (2018) and the Compass albums Brand New Good Old Days (2021), Grass Roots (2023) and Let’s Party About It (2025), recorded for the band’s thirty-fifth anniversary. He has also played with Peter Rowan, John Cowan and Neil Young.

The Colorado Bluegrass Music Society named him to its Hall of Honor in 2015, and Leftover Salmon was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame as part of its 2021 class, receiving the award on stage at the Boulder Theater on 25 November 2022.