Jeff Partin

He had been playing bluegrass for several years when, at thirteen, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry with Mike Snyder. In June 2012 Volume Five, the Mississippi band led by the fiddler Glen Harrell, announced him as its new guitarist, also expected to play resonator guitar on stage, and he made his debut with the band at the Red, White and Bluegrass Festival in North Carolina. On its album Voices (Mountain Fever, January 2015) he played resonator guitar and wrote three of the songs, among them “Crazy Night,” which had come out as a single the previous November.

When Mountain Heart regrouped in November 2014, with Josh Shilling, Seth Taylor, Aaron Ramsey and the returning fiddler Jim VanCleve, Partin took over the bass and joined Shilling on the vocals. On the band’s Blue Skies (Compass, May 2016) he played resonator guitar, lap steel and bass and sang, on a set that included Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” and in 2018 the four-piece core of the band was Shilling, Partin on guitar, Dobro and vocals, Taylor and Ramsey. In the same years he played bass and resonator guitar with Ramsey, the fiddler Bryan McDowell, the banjo player Cory Walker and the guitarist Jake Stargel on Section House’s A Collection of Instrumentals (Mountain Fever, 2016), and bass and Dobro on Amanda Cook’s Deep Water (Mountain Fever, November 2017), which included Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’s “Caleb Meyer.” Volume Five brought him back as a guest on Dobro for Drifter (2016), and he played bass and resonator guitar and sang tenor throughout its For Those Who Care to Listen (October 2019), taking the lead on “Somewhere.”

On 20 December 2019 Rhonda Vincent announced that he would join the Rage on resonator guitar after the new year. On her album Music Is What I See (Upper Management, April 2021) he played Dobro and sang harmony, with Josh Williams, Aaron McDaris, Hunter Berry and Mickey Harris in the band, on songs such as Leroy Drumm and Pete Goble’s “I’d Like to Be a Train,” and sang lead on two verses of “I Ain’t Been Nowhere.” He stayed on Volume Five’s records too, playing resonator guitar on “When Karma Comes Calling,” cut in January 2021, and resonator guitar and bass on Leave a Light On (2025). For the banjo player Jr. Williams’s Railroad Town (Mountain Fever, September 2022) he played resonator guitar and bass, with Ramsey, Adam Steffey and Nathan Aldridge, on tracks such as “Gonna Settle Down” and “I Feel the Blues Moving In.”

By 2025 East Nash Grass was Harry Clark on mandolin, Cory Walker on banjo, James Kee on guitar, Maddie Denton on fiddle and Partin on bass and Dobro, and on its Mountain Fever album All God’s Children (2025) he sang lead on “The Love We Gave Up.” In May 2026 he was announced as the bass player for a tribute to Mountain Heart at Blue Grass Park in Camp Springs, North Carolina, alongside the band’s founders Barry Abernathy and Jim VanCleve.