Heidi Andrade

She started on the fiddle at age seven but did not turn to old-time music until her late teens. She and her husband, Roy Andrade, who played banjo in the band, met in Nashville and lived in California before moving near East Tennessee State University in 1999 for its country music program. In their first week there they met two future bandmates, mandolin player Thomas Sneed and Martha Scanlan.

By 2002 the band, then in its third year, had gone full-time. That summer it played the Bean Blossom and Grand Targhee festivals and was booked for an International Bluegrass Music Association showcase in Louisville that October. Andrade, an elementary school teacher, took a sabbatical from teaching but kept working with her school’s string band and giving private lessons.