Jake Stargel

He won the Georgia flatpicking championship as a young teenager and was fifteen when he went on the road with the Lovell Sisters, the sister act that later became Larkin Poe. He then worked with the Greencards and with Bearfoot, and he was already regarded as a protégé of Bryan Sutton. Besides acoustic guitar he plays mandolin, piano and electric guitar.

In June 2010, at nineteen, he joined Mountain Heart as lead guitarist, taking the place Clay Jones had just left, as the band moved toward a broader crossover sound; his first shows included a co-bill with Tony Rice at the Red, White & Bluegrass Festival in Morganton, North Carolina, on 1 July. In January 2012 he moved to Sierra Hull & Highway 111. He played guitar on Russ Carson’s first solo album, Last Chance (Patuxent, 2011), alongside Marshall Wilborn, Dominick Leslie, Michael Cleveland and Patrick McAvinue. The IBMA’s Momentum Award for instrumentalist came in 2014, when he was twenty-three.

His later work has been largely in Nashville studios, on records as different as Rhonda Vincent’s Christmas Time, the fiddler John Mailander’s Forecast, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’s Fiddler’s Pastime and the Wooks’ Flyin’ High, and he recorded George Jackson’s 2024 set of one hundred fiddle pieces in a single long session. In February 2026 Sutton released their guitar duet on Tommy Jackson’s “Crazy Creek,” which Stargel had suggested, as part of his From Roots to Branches series.