Jenni Lyn Gardner

She started on guitar at five in Conway, and her love of bluegrass came from her father, who plays banjo and guitar. At nine she picked with Bill Monroe backstage at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina, and a photograph of the two of them playing has been displayed at the International Bluegrass Music Museum. She lived for a few years in Charleston, playing mandolin in places such as the Southend Brewery, O’Malley’s and the Blind Tiger, and before Della Mae she toured with Bradley Walker, Cages Bend and the Mark Newton Band and recorded on Proud to Be a Daughter of Bluegrass, a project that won an IBMA award.

Della Mae, the Boston band of women that the fiddler Kimber Ludiker and the bassist Amanda Kowalski had started the year before, took her on as mandolinist and singer in May 2010. She played mandolin on its first full-length album, I Built This Heart (2011), recorded at Q Division Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts, with Celia Woodsmith, Ludiker, Courtney Hartman and Kowalski, and on This World Oft Can Be (Rounder, 2013), with Shelby Means on bass, which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in the year the IBMA named Della Mae its Emerging Artist. With the band she toured abroad for the U.S. State Department, starting with Pakistan and Central Asia in 2012, and played in more than thirty countries. She also played and sang on other artists’ projects with her bandmates: mandolin on Larry Cordle’s “Highway 40 Blues” on Special Consensus’s Long I Ride (Compass, 2016), and harmony on Louisa Branscomb’s “Steel Rails” on Gonna Love Anyway (Compass, 2019).

In February 2015, the same weekend she played the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival with Della Mae, she debuted her own Jenni Lyn Gardner & the Palmetto Bluegrass Band there and at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, with Kyle Tuttle on banjo, Laura Orshaw on fiddle, Tony Watt on guitar and Josh Dayton on bass, a group drawn from Nashville and Boston, the two cities where she had lived. While Della Mae was on hiatus she made Burn Another Candle, released by Katherine St. Records in Nashville on 7 April 2017. She wrote eight of its twelve songs, and alongside them are songs by Jim Lauderdale and Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive; she sings lead and plays mandolin and electric guitar, with Frank Rische on guitar, Tuttle on banjo and Mike Bub on bass, and guests including the fiddlers Jason Carter and Ron Stewart, Hartman and Woodsmith. She has described the record as a reflection of her childhood and of who she is now.

When Della Mae came back from its break she played on The Butcher Shoppe EP (Rounder, 2019) and on Headlight (Rounder, January 2020), produced by Dan Knobler, before Maddie Witler took over the mandolin in 2020. As of 2017 she lived in Nashville.