Jason Fraley
Jason Fraley is a mandolinist, guitarist and baritone singer from Monroe, North Carolina, who with his father, the banjo player Jim Fraley, and the bassist Brian Hinson formed the bluegrass band Deeper Shade of Blue in 2000 and played mandolin in it for twenty-two years. Since leaving the band at the end of 2022 he has worked as a minister of music and a session player.
He grew up watching his father play and, in his words, knew early that a picker’s life was the one he wanted; his father taught him his first chords. He joined Deeper Shade of Blue straight out of college, and for some twenty years father and son stood side by side in the band, with Troy Pope on guitar, Frank Poindexter on Dobro and, from 2015, Scott Burgess on bass. Jason sang the baritone part in its three-part harmony.
After a run of self-produced albums the band signed with Mountain Fever, which released Steam in June 2018. Jim Fraley retired in 2020 and Steve Wilson took over the banjo, and in 2021 the band moved to Pinecastle, whose first single with it, Larry Gatlin’s “Broken Lady,” had Burgess singing lead over the harmonies of Pope and Fraley. The album Twenty, released on 5 November 2021, marked the band’s two decades.
On 28 October 2022 he released his first solo album, Acoustic Flavor of Christmas, ten instrumentals on which he played acoustic and hollow-body guitar, acoustic bass guitar, mandolin and drums. At the end of that year he stepped down from Deeper Shade of Blue to give more time to his family and to his work as minister of music at Lee Park Baptist Church in Monroe, where he was also to be ordained, and he played a farewell concert with the band at the church on 24 February 2023. He has gone on playing sessions, on mandolin for Steve Wilson’s Wilson Banjo Co. on The Gavel (2024), Memory Lane (2025) and “Burn Down the Fields” (2026), and on guitar for Ashleigh Graham’s “Pinewood Prison” (2026).
