Emmett Franz

The Franz Family toured continuously from 1991 to 2011, playing churches, camps, prisons and private parties, with Randy and Ruth Ann Franz on guitar and bass and their children on the other instruments: Caleb on guitar, mandolin and banjo, Audra on bass, Olivia on fiddle, and Emmett, the youngest son, on dobro. He began on harmonica and took up the dobro at fourteen. The family recorded the albums The Tale You’ll Never Hear (2008) and Sorrow and Wisdom (2012), part of them at a studio session in Denver in December 2009, and stopped touring in 2011 as the children married and turned to other music.

After that he toured with other artists, and he can be seen in performance videos with the singer Chelsea Moon. In January 2015 he released a solo EP of six tracks, Wanderers & Whims, which includes “Lucy Gray” and “Land Across the Sea.”

Looking for work closer to home, he wrote to the Petersens in January 2017 to offer his services on dobro. The band turned him down at first, but that summer, with two of its members away, it called him in to fill in at its Branson shows; it hired him again that fall, when it released Shenandoah, and in 2018 asked him to join full-time. He plays Scheerhorn and Byrl dobros, and in the band’s working method, after the singer picks a key and Katie Petersen lays out the arrangement, he adds counter-melodies and arrangement ideas. His dobro is on the band’s albums from Homesick for a Country (2019) on, including “Walking in Jerusalem,” “I Feel the Blues Moving In” and “It Rains Everywhere I Go,” and as of November 2025 he was playing with the Petersens at the Little Opry Theater in Branson. In June 2025 he was the featured guest on Extol Collective’s single “Be Thou My Vision.”