John Bowman

Doyle Lawson took him on in 1991 as Quicksilver’s tenor singer and guitarist. On the band’s gospel album Treasures Money Can’t Buy (Brentwood, 1992) he played lead and rhythm guitar and sang lead and tenor, with Lawson on mandolin, Jim Mills on banjo and Shelton Feazell on bass. After nearly two years with Quicksilver he joined Alison Krauss & Union Station as guitarist and toured with Krauss until 1994.

That year he married Becky Isaacs and joined her family’s band, the Isaacs, playing guitar, banjo and fiddle; he stayed twelve years. His first solo album, Footprints of Faith (Mountain Home, 1994), had him on mandolin and guitar with Jim Mills, David Johnson and Ben Isaacs, and the Isaacs and Feazell singing behind him. He was confirmed as a minister in 1997 and later earned an exhorter’s license through the Church of God in Cleveland, Tennessee. Further gospel albums followed on Mountain Home, Remember Me (2000) and Take This Road (2003), and he played guitar on other Mountain Home records, among them Larry Sparks’s New Highway (1998) and Adam Steffey’s Grateful (2001).

In 2006 he left the road to teach at a Christian school in La Follette, Tennessee, where he stayed five years, but from 2007 to 2009 he also toured with J.D. Crowe and the New South, playing fiddle. In 2009 he was one of the five founders of the Boxcars, with Ron Stewart, Adam Steffey, Keith Garrett and Harold Nixon; he sang tenor and was one of the band’s four lead singers, and he and Stewart traded fiddle and banjo on stage. He is on the band’s first three Mountain Home albums, The Boxcars (2010), All In (2012) and It’s Just a Road (2013), the last nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. His own Family Chain: The Songs of Joe Isaacs (Pisgah Ridge, 2011), a tribute to his father-in-law with Steffey, Rob Ickes and Jimmy Edmonds, was nominated for a Dove Award.

In May 2014 he told the Boxcars he was leaving for a full-time singing and preaching ministry, and he played his last shows with them in June. Worship Him (Pisgah Ridge, 17 June 2014) was just his voice and guitar, the way he had been singing at revivals. Beautiful Ashes (Mountain Home, 2015), recorded at the Track Shack in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, with Ron Stewart on fiddle and Rob Ickes on resonator guitar and co-produced by Troy Engle, included the Easter Brothers’ “They’re Holding Up the Ladder” and Carter Stanley’s “Baby Girl,” and The Hole (Mountain Home, September 2019) took its title from a Skip Ewing song. In October 2026 he rejoined the original Boxcars, on fiddle among other instruments, for their reunion at the Blue Highway Fest in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.