John Rigsby

He was born on 29 March 1975 and grew up around Sandy Hook and Isonville; the mandolinist Don Rigsby is his cousin. The Sloas Brothers were an early influence on his playing. John Sloas taught him about tone on the fiddle, and Rigsby learned Bill Monroe’s “Poor White Folks” from him. While still in high school he played with Dwight Whitley and Sideroads.

When Rigsby joined Stanley in August 1995, the band was Ralph Stanley II on guitar, James Alan Shelton on lead guitar, Steve Sparkman on banjo, James Price on fiddle and Jack Cooke on bass. At Maggard Sound Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, on 28 March 1996, a day before his twenty-first birthday, he and Ralph II recorded most of an album of Stanley Brothers songs with the full band, finishing it on 26 April. First issued as A Tribute to Ralph Stanley, it was reissued by Copper Creek as Clinch Mountain Echoes: Songs in the Stanley Tradition. Rigsby sang tenor to Ralph II’s lead and played mandolin throughout, took the lead himself on Stanley’s “Medicine Springs” and played the fiddle on “Poor White Folks.”

On Stanley’s own albums of those years he played mandolin and sang tenor. On Short Life of Trouble: Songs of Grayson and Whitter (1996) Stanley sang most of the leads with Rigsby on tenor. For the gospel album My All and All (1997) Rigsby suggested the Sloas Brothers’ “Loving Grace of God,” and he was in the band behind the guest singers of the double album Clinch Mountain Country, recorded between May and December 1997. On Ralph II’s first solo album, Listen to My Hammer Ring (1998), he played mandolin and fiddle and sang tenor.

Between two spells with Stanley he spent about eighteen months with Melvin Goins, and in late 1999 he recorded an album of his own, Forks of the Ivy, at River Track studios in Louisa, Kentucky; Hay Holler issued it in 2000. He described it as a tribute to his favorite singers, and it draws on the Sloas Brothers, Charlie Monroe and Charlie Moore. Most tracks are backed by John McNeely, Jason Hale and Dale Vanderpool, his bandmates with the Goins Brothers and Melvin Goins & Windy Mountain. Don Rigsby joins him on two a cappella songs, and the title piece, Rigsby’s own, is a fiddle-and-banjo duet with Kenny Sloas on clawhammer banjo.

Back with Stanley, he played mandolin on While the Ages Roll On (2000), Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001) and Lost in the Lonesome Pines, made with Jim Lauderdale, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, as well as on Ralph II’s Pretty Girls, City Lights (2000), Stanley Blues (2002), for which the two of them wrote “Homeward Bound,” and Carrying On (2004). He played mandolin and sang on Stanley’s A Distant Land to Roam: Songs of the Carter Family, recorded in 2003 and released by Columbia in 2006. By 2004 he was playing fiddle as well as mandolin: on the 2004 sessions for Sings His Favorites Now and Then, a CD sold at shows, and on the gospel album Shine On (Rebel, 2005), where he also traded the lead with Stanley on “The Lowest Valley.”

By early 2008 he was again playing with Melvin Goins, and he and the banjo player Jack Hicks, a former Blue Grass Boy, were working out their notice there when they formed Summertown Road with the singer and guitarist Bo Isaac and the bassist Randy Thomas. The name came from a Marty Raybon song. The band played its first show in September 2008 and signed with Rounder, and Don Rigsby produced its first album, Summertown Road. Rigsby played fiddle and mandolin, sang lead on seven tracks and wrote “If I Win” with his wife, Lisa, and Hicks, finishing a song he had started during his years with Stanley; it reached No. 17 on the Bluegrass Unlimited chart. By the time the album came out, on 16 February 2010, he had left the band, and Zach Rambo had taken over on mandolin.

He went on to record with Ralph Stanley II on fiddle and mandolin, on Born to Be a Drifter (2011), Ralph Stanley II & the Clinch Mountain Boys (2017) and Lord Help Me Find the Way (2019), and with both father and son on Side by Side, their album for Rebel. As a guest on Ralph Stanley’s gospel album A Mother’s Prayer (Rebel) he played mandolin, sang tenor and took the lead on “That Home Far Away.” Around 2013 he sold a second solo CD of his own, John Rigsby, on which he sings most of the leads and plays fiddle instrumentals such as Kenny Baker’s “Windy City Rag.” It closes its gospel side with an a cappella “Beulah Land,” the song he sang at Ralph Stanley’s funeral in 2016.