Gaven Largent

He grew up in a musical family in Winchester, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and was born on 22 April 1996. He began on guitar at eight and resonator guitar at nine, and at thirteen he was invited to play with Rhonda Vincent and the Rage on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. From 2012, while still at Handley High School, he played in local bands including Bud’s Collective and Lonesome Highway, and he was a regular at the SPBGMA convention from his early teens.

After graduating in 2014 he joined Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper, which presented him at SPBGMA in February 2015 as its new banjo player; he also played Dobro duets with Cleveland on stage. In December 2015 Blue Highway hired him to replace its founding Dobro player, Rob Ickes, and he first played with the band at Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 1 January 2016. He was nominated as SPBGMA’s Dobro Player of the Year that year, and he played resonator guitar on Blue Highway’s Rounder album Original Traditional (September 2016), which was nominated for a Grammy. After three years of touring with Blue Highway he joined Dailey & Vincent on Dobro and banjo, and then the Dan Tyminski Band, alongside Maddie Denton on fiddle, Jason Davis on banjo and Grace Davis on bass.

He played Dobro on the first album by East Nash Grass, the band that grew out of a Monday-night residency at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tennessee, released in July 2021, and sang the lead on its “Mountain Bluebird”; the band was named the IBMA’s New Artist of the Year in 2024. With Tyminski he sang harmony and played resonator guitar on “Why You Been Gone So Long,” a duet for Tyminski’s EP One More Time Before You Go: A Tribute to Tony Rice (July 2022), and played Dobro throughout Tyminski’s Live from the Ryman (August 2024), with Harry Clark on mandolin. He also played Dobro on Maddie Denton’s album Playin’ in This Town (July 2021), including her “In Tall Buildings.” The IBMA gave him a Momentum Award as Instrumentalist of the Year in 2023, when it described him as a multi-instrumentalist for East Nash Grass and Tyminski, and the Resophonic Guitar Player of the Year award followed in Raleigh in September 2024. Besides Dobro he plays banjo, guitar and mandolin, works as a session musician and builds resonator guitars in his own woodworking shop.