Jeff Clair
Jeff Clair is a singer and guitarist from Jackson, Kentucky, who played mandolin with Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers from 2011 to 2018 and leads his own band, Half Past Lonesome. He also plays banjo, and he has long been a student of the traditional style of Sparks and James King.
Clair began playing guitar and singing at about eleven or twelve and played in bands from middle school on, among them Bluegrass Fever Band and New South Wind. For several years he played banjo with Sam Wilson & the Bluegrass Colonels.
In 2011 he filled in on mandolin with Larry Sparks and stayed with the Lonesome Ramblers, on and off, until 2018, including an appearance with Sparks on the Grand Ole Opry when Alison Krauss joined them. On Sparks’s Rebel album New Moon Over My Shoulder (2019), he shares the mandolin parts with Evan Wilson, alongside Michael Feagan on fiddle, Ron Stewart on banjo and Matthew Madden on bass, on songs such as “I Only Exist,” from Sparks’s years with Ralph Stanley.
His own gospel album, They Called Him Jesus, was self-released in 2012, with Clair on guitar and lead vocals, John Rigsby on mandolin and fiddle, Mitch Bentley on bass, Rex Patrick on banjo and Jeff Brown and Ricky Prater singing harmony. He wrote the title song shortly before the sessions, and the rest came from writers such as Tom T. and Dixie Hall and Larry Sparks. By July 2013, when he signed with Lonesome Day Records, he was leading Half Past Lonesome, with Ken Blanton on mandolin, Bentley on bass and Patrick on banjo; Kenny O’Quinn took over the mandolin and harmony singing in January 2014. The band made an album for Lonesome Day.
Since stepping back from full-time touring in 2018 Clair has played select dates with Half Past Lonesome, and he has organized the Mine Made Bluegrass Festival for several years. He teaches physics and history at Breathitt County High School, and in October 2026 the regional development group SOAR named him Appalachian Teacher of the Year.
