Joy Adams

Musician
Best known for Cello

Joy Adams is a cellist, songwriter and composer who plays fiddle tunes and orchestral repertoire alike. She is a founding member of Big Richard, the Colorado string band of four women formed in 2021, and has toured with Nathaniel Rateliff and Darol Anger and recorded for film and television soundtracks.

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She grew up on a farm north of Spokane, Washington. Her touring and stage work has included Nathaniel Rateliff, Darol Anger and the band Half Pelican, NPR’s Live from Here with Chris Thile, the Newport Folk Festival, Red Rocks, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival with Bonnie Paine of Elephant Revival. As a session cellist she played on the Emmy-winning soundtrack to the Netflix series Godless, on the Grammy- and Emmy-winning soundtrack to The Queen’s Gambit, on Jeremy Fox’s Grammy-nominated jazz album With Love, and on Rateliff’s Red Rocks 2020, Half Pelican’s Live from the Swamp and John Lowell’s This Long Stretch of Gravel.

Big Richard began when a private bluegrass festival in Colorado found it had booked an all-male lineup and asked the fiddler Eve Panning to put together a band of women. Panning called Adams, the mandolinist Bonnie Sims and the bassist Emma Rose, and the four first played together at an invitation-only festival in Castle Rock in 2021. The band’s 2022 set at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival came out as a live album, and with Hazel Royer later on bass it made Girl Dinner (2025), recorded at Vermillion Road Studio in Longmont, and Pet (Signature Sounds, 2026).

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