Justin Moses

He grew up in Madisonville, halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga. His father played guitar and traded instruments, so fiddles, banjos and other stringed instruments came and went in the house, and his mother played piano. Watching the Primitive Quartet on a Sunday-morning gospel program on Knoxville television, he became fascinated by their mandolin player, and at six he got a mandolin for Christmas, paid for jointly by his parents, grandparents and great-grandmother. His father showed him his first chords, and a local musician, Harley Millsaps, gave him about six weeks of lessons, recording pieces on cassette for him to learn by ear.

By his early twenties he was on the road with his first professional band, and audiences first knew him as the banjo player in Blue Moon Rising, an East Tennessee group led by Chris West and Keith Garrett; on its album Where Wood Meets Steel (Crosscut, 2002) he played banjo and fiddle. He came back to play fiddle on the band’s After All This Time (Mountain Fever, 2019). In 2006 he released an album of his own, Dusty Roads, on the DustyGrass label. In 2007 he joined the Dan Tyminski Band, formed while Union Station was on hiatus, with Adam Steffey, Ron Stewart and Barry Bales, playing fiddle, banjo and resonator guitar and singing tenor. Its album Wheels (Rounder, June 2008) has Moses on fiddle on most tracks, on banjo and Dobro on others, and singing tenor behind Tyminski; it was the IBMA’s Album of the Year in 2009. With Tyminski he first played the Grand Ole Opry.

After the band stopped touring he freelanced, and in July 2010 he replaced Jim Mills on banjo in Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, adding some resonator guitar; he played banjo on Skaggs’s Music to My Ears (2012) and stayed until the end of January 2014. He also played second mandolin in Sierra Hull’s band and filled in with NewFound Road and Band of Ruhks. In 2014 he and Hull toured for the State Department’s American Music Abroad program, from Hawaii, Guam and Micronesia to Hong Kong, Turkey, Tel Aviv and the West Bank, and they married in 2017. In 2015 he released an EP of Dobro instrumentals, Beyond Measure.

In June 2018 he joined Blue Highway on resonator guitar, replacing Gaven Largent and becoming only the third Dobro player in the band’s history after Rob Ickes and Largent. That autumn he won his first IBMA Resophonic Guitar Player of the Year award, on the same night Hull won Mandolin Player of the Year, and a couple of months later both played on the CMA Awards broadcast in a tribute to Skaggs with Brad Paisley. He then worked for some years with the Gibson Brothers. His session work includes Junior Sisk’s Brand New Shade of Blue (2018) and the songwriter Jefferson Ross’s Dogwood Cats (2014), on which he played Dobro, fiddle, banjo, mandolin and Weissenborn guitar, and he has performed with Vince Gill, Bruce Hornsby, Peter Frampton and Barry Gibb. He has also hosted a podcast on the music business, CosMoses.

Fall Like Rain (Mountain Fever, January 2021) was his first album as a leader, singer and songwriter. It opens with his bluegrass version of Eric Clapton’s title song, with Bryan Sutton and Cody Kilby trading guitar solos and Hull on mandolin, and includes his mandolin duet with Hull, “Taxland,” the instrumentals “Wise & Born” and “Locust Hill,” a version of Coldplay’s “U.F.O.,” and guest vocals by Del McCoury, Dan Tyminski and Shawn Lane; Eric Gibson wrote the liner notes. He won the resophonic award again in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026, and at the 2026 awards show in Chattanooga he played with Patty Loveless, Sister Sadie and Stuart Duncan.