Hunter Berry

He grew up in Elizabethton, in the foothills of upper East Tennessee, played the spoons at four and took up the fiddle by the age of nine, learning from the old-time fiddler Benny Sims, who had played with Flatt & Scruggs, and from the local teacher David Yates. He also came through the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University. Doyle Lawson asked him to join Quicksilver while he was still in the eighth grade; once he had arranged to finish school with a GED, he went on the road with Lawson at seventeen and stayed nine months. He also played with Melvin Goins.

In January 2002 he took Michael Cleveland’s place on fiddle in Rhonda Vincent & the Rage. That year he also played on Dave Evans’s Rebel album Hang Out a Light for Me, recorded at River Tracks Studio in Louisa, Kentucky, and on Josh Williams’s I’ll Meet You in the Gloryland. With Kenny Ingram on banjo, Mickey Harris on bass and, from 2004, Josh Williams on guitar, he was part of the touring band recorded at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis for Ragin’ Live (Rounder, 2005), which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. In March 2007 he released his first album of his own, Wow Baby, with Doyle Lawson on mandolin, Tony Rice on guitar, Ronnie Stewart on banjo and Darrin Vincent on bass, and guests including Marty Stuart, Bobby Osborne, Dan Tyminski, Adam Steffey, Jason Carter, Sonya Isaacs and Rhonda Vincent. Alongside fiddle pieces such as “Ragtime Annie,” “Leather Britches,” “Billy in the Lowground” and Arthur Smith’s “Fiddler’s Dream” it had two of his own, the title track and “Waltz for Mom and Dad,” and he overdubbed three fiddle parts on “In the Pines” and “Blue Kentucky Girl,” the latter sung by Vincent’s daughter Sally Sandker. In the spring of 2009, in his eighth season with the Rage, he was teaching fiddle on the faculty of the ETSU program; by then he had been named SPBGMA Fiddle Performer of the Year several times and nominated by the IBMA for Fiddle Player of the Year.

The Rage of the later 2000s and 2010s played and sang everything on Vincent’s records. Berry played fiddle and mandolin and sang harmony on Destination Life (Rounder, 2009), another Grammy nominee, and played on Taken (2010), the first release on Vincent’s Upper Management label, and on the band tracks of Only Me (2014). He was on All the Rage, Volume One, recorded in concert at Bethel University in McKenzie, Tennessee, and released in November 2016, on which he is featured on his own “Wow Baby”; it won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2018. He was also in the band for Live at the Ryman, recorded on 14 July 2016 with Bobby and Sonny Osborne, Jesse McReynolds and Mac Wiseman as guests, and for Music Is What I See (2021).

He left the Rage late in 2022, after twenty years, and in February 2023 joined the Little Roy & Lizzy Show. He has since toured with his own group, Hunter Berry and His Bluegrass Band, including a show at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia.