Joe Dean

He grew up outside St. Louis, Missouri, came to the music before his teens and could play banjo, guitar and mandolin well before he was old enough to drive. He first heard Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver at eleven, and that decided him on the banjo and on the band’s style of bluegrass. His first regular job, while he was still in school, was with Bull Harman & Bull’s Eye, and he also played with Barry Scott and Second Wind.

In 2006 he heard that the newly formed Dailey & Vincent band needed a banjo player. Joey Cox had started in the job, and when Cox pulled out Dean was hired and recut the banjo parts for the debut album, Dailey & Vincent, which Rounder released on 29 January 2008. His banjo drives the opening song, “Sweet Carrie,” and he sings the bass part on a gospel quartet song. He stayed with Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent for about five years.

In April 2012, in what amounted to a trade, he moved to Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver and the band’s banjo player, Jessie Baker, moved to Dailey & Vincent. With Lawson he played banjo, and sometimes guitar, on the gospel album Open Carefully, Message Inside (Mountain Home, 2014), In Session (2015), Burden Bearer (2016) and Life Is a Story (2017), alongside Dustin Pyrtle, Josh Swift and Eli Johnston. In June 2020, approaching his thirtieth birthday and after touring since he was eighteen, he announced that he was leaving Quicksilver to take a break from the road, while planning to release music of his own later.