Jerry McMillan
Jerry McMillan is a bass player and singer from Salem, Virginia, who was a founding member of the Lonesome River Band and its main lead singer through the 1980s. He played bass and sang on the band’s first four albums, from I Guess Heartaches Are in Style This Year (1985) to Looking for Yourself (1989), before Ronnie Bowman took his place in 1990.
He learned his music at home. He had a brother about fifteen years older who already played with their father, and from the age of eight, in 1971, through his high school years the three played together as the McMillans, mostly at fiddlers’ conventions around the area. He picked up fiddle, guitar and mandolin and played in several young bands with his schoolmates Steve Thomas and Jeff Midkiff before settling on the bass.
The Lonesome River Band was his first serious commitment. In Tim Austin’s account, the original lineup, which started working up material around the middle of 1983, was Austin on guitar, Thomas on mandolin and fiddle, Rick Williams on banjo and McMillan on bass, playing clubs around Roanoke and dates in North Carolina and West Virginia. When Thomas and Williams left, Austin and McMillan kept the band going, with Midkiff and a series of banjo players. On the debut album, issued by Shar-Lyn in 1985 with Austin, Midkiff and Billy Wheeler, he and Austin sang the lead and tenor parts on nearly everything, and the record included his own song “Roll On to the Sea.”
Rebel Records signed the band for The Lonesome River Band (1986), with Randy Driskill on banjo and Mike Auldridge guesting, and McMillan stayed through two more Rebel albums: Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1988), with Adam Steffey on mandolin, Brian Fesler on banjo and Steve Thomas back as a guest fiddler, and Looking for Yourself (1989), with Dan Tyminski on mandolin, Dale Perry on banjo and Stuart Duncan on fiddle. In 1987 the band played the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Loew’s hotel and casino in Monaco, before Prince Rainier. By September 1990 Ronnie Bowman had replaced him; Austin, Tyminski, Bowman and the new banjo player Sammy Shelor went on to record Carrying the Tradition (1991).
