Gena Britt

She grew up in Star, North Carolina, where her grandfather called square dances, and string music first reached her in the dance halls. She was clogging in competitions by the age of five, and at seven she told the host of a Raleigh television show that she wanted a banjo for Christmas. She got one a year later and took weekly lessons from Charles Singleton, though she learned mostly by ear from cassette tapes. As a teenager she met Andrea Roberts at a festival in South Carolina and was taken on as the bass player in Roberts’s all-woman band, Petticoat Junction, and she spent a couple of years with them. After high school she moved to Nashville.

Back on banjo, she played in the North Carolina group New Vintage, whose album Timeless (New Time, 1993) had Earl Lewellyn on guitar, Russell Johnson on mandolin, Jan Johansson on fiddle and Zack McLamb on bass. She then joined Lou Reid & Carolina. On the band’s first album, Lou Reid and Carolina (Rebel, 1996), recorded at Doobie Shea Studios in Ferrum, Virginia, she played banjo and sang lead and harmony alongside Reid, Alan Bibey on mandolin and Randy Barnes on bass, with Aubrey Haynie on fiddle; the songs included “Blue Kentucky Wind,” “Handsome Molly” and Flatt and Scruggs’s “God Loves His Children,” and she played bass on “Feeling Like I Do.” She was still in the band for Blue Heartache (Rebel, 2000), on banjo and vocals with Reid, Brian Stephens on guitar, Jeff Deaton on bass and Ronnie Stewart on fiddle. She also worked in radio relations for Doobie Shea Records.

In 2001 she formed the Gena Britt Band, which she led for about four years, and she freelanced widely, filling in with the Lonesome River Band, Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road, Sally Jones & the Sidewinders, the Alecia Nugent Band, the Donna Hughes Band, the Dale Ann Bradley Band and the Skip Cherryholmes Quintet. She also played in Alan Bibey & Grasstowne. She was one of the singers on Mark Newton’s Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass (Rebel), the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2001, and in 2002 she was nominated for SPBGMA’s traditional Female Vocalist of the Year. In 2003 she completed IBMA’s Leadership Bluegrass program.

While she was Lorraine Jordan’s banjo player, the two called together other women pickers and singers to record as the Daughters of Bluegrass, with Tom T. and Dixie Hall on Blue Circle Records. Their album Back to the Well was the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2006, and the same year she shared in the IBMA Album of the Year, Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer, to which she contributed. Her first album under her own name, Doing All I Can, came out in 2008; it included her song “The House.”

In December 2012 she began playing with Dale Ann Bradley, Tina Adair, Deanie Richardson and Beth Lawrence, and in August 2013 the five took the name Sister Sadie, a band built around the voices of Bradley, Adair and Britt. She sang Lynn Morris and Marshall Wilborn’s “Don’t Tell Me Stories” on the first album, Sister Sadie (Pinecastle, 2016), and sang harmony behind Bradley on Sister Sadie II (Pinecastle, 2018), which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. The band debuted on the Grand Ole Opry in March 2019, won the IBMA’s Vocal Group of the Year in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and was named Entertainer of the Year in 2020. As the lineup changed around them, Britt and Richardson stayed on as the two remaining founders. On No Fear (Mountain Home, 2024), nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2025, she shared the lead vocals with Jaelee Roberts and Dani Flowers, and she was on banjo again for All Will Be Well (Mountain Home, June 2025).

Her second solo album, Chronicle: Friends and Music, came out on Pinecastle in July 2019, and in 2022 she issued the single “A Little Bit of You.” She won SPBGMA’s Banjo Player of the Year award in 2022. In February 2025 she released “Ralph’s Banjo Special,” Ralph Stanley’s instrumental, with Kristin Scott Benson and Alison Brown, and it won the IBMA’s Instrumental Recording of the Year that September. Signed to Mountain Home as a solo artist in 2025, she released Marshall Wilborn’s “Goodbye to the Blues” in April, with Jason Carter, Alan Bartram, John Meador and Jonathan Dillon in the band and Tina Steffey on clawhammer banjo; “He Likes to Fish,” which she wrote with Katelyn Ingardia, in June; and the album Streets, Rivers, Dreams & Heartaches in November 2025. As of late 2025 she was still touring with Sister Sadie.

• 2001: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, Follow Me Back to the Fold (Mark Newton and others)
• 2006: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, Back to the Well (Daughters of Bluegrass)
• 2006: IBMA Album of the Year, Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer (contributor)
• 2019, 2020, 2021: IBMA Vocal Group of the Year (Sister Sadie)
• 2020: IBMA Entertainer of the Year (Sister Sadie)
• 2022: SPBGMA Banjo Player of the Year
• 2025: IBMA Instrumental Recording of the Year, “Ralph’s Banjo Special” (with Kristin Scott Benson and Alison Brown)