K.C. Groves
KC Groves is a mandolin player, guitarist, bass player, singer and songwriter who co-founded the old-time string band Uncle Earl in 2000 and was its bandleader for more than a decade. She grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, and has long been based in Lyons, Colorado, where she runs a weekly bluegrass jam and founded a concert series; the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society has inducted her into its Hall of Honor.
Her father sang and yodeled country songs, and she had piano lessons from the age of six. In the early 1990s she took up the guitar and mandolin and began writing songs, and she made her name in the Ann Arbor and Detroit music scene. As a young musician she was mentored by Sally Van Meter, Charles Sawtelle and Laurie Lewis. Her first CD, Can You Hear It (Sweatergirl Music, 1999), produced by Sawtelle, is thirteen of her own songs, recorded in 1998 at Rancho D’Ville in Boulder, Colorado, with Sawtelle on lead guitar and Tony Furtado, Tim O’Brien, Laurie Lewis and Mark Schatz among the players; it won her the Detroit Music Award for Best Bluegrass Artist/Group in 1999. Her second solo album of original songs, Something Familiar, followed in 2004, and she was a finalist in the Telluride Troubadour contest.
Uncle Earl began in 2000 when Groves and Jo Serrapère, both songwriters and multi-instrumentalists, put together a temporary group to play a few shows promoting a CD of traditional material they had recorded; the shows went well and the band stayed together. Groves has said the name was a joke for an all-women band, though they were fans of Earl Scruggs, Steve Earle and Uncle Tupelo. The band’s first album, She Went Upstairs, came out on the Detroit Radio label in 2002. By the end of 2003 Serrapère had left and the lineup was Groves on mandolin and guitar, Abigail Washburn on banjo, Rayna Gellert on fiddle and Kristin Andreassen on guitar, fiddle and clogging, all four singing, with a succession of bass players.
After two EPs in 2004, Going to the Western Slope and Raise a Ruckus, Rounder released She Waits for Night (2005), produced by Dirk Powell, and Waterloo, Tennessee (2007), produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, which was the number one album of 2007 on the Folk DJ chart. The band toured widely in the United States and abroad. In 2010 Gellert and Washburn left, and Groves and Andreassen carried on with Stephanie Coleman, Paula Bradley and Rachel Eddy, with Groves largely taking over the bass, touring Europe and Australia that year; they have reconvened the band from time to time since, and in 2016 the Andreassen, Gellert, Groves and Washburn lineup came together again for a few shows.
In Colorado she has worked with Riley Baugus and with Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon, toured on bass and vocals with Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, and performed as a duo with the singer Greg Blake. In Lyons, home of Planet Bluegrass, she founded the High Street Concert series and leads the weekly bluegrass jam at Oskar Blues. She has also produced other musicians: Free the Honey’s Fine Bloom, which topped the Folk DJ chart in October 2015, and Barbara Jo Kammer’s One Song at a Time (2017).
