Kameron Keller

He was a student at East Tennessee State University when Alan Bibey announced him in April 2010 as the new bassist of Grasstowne, in a reshuffled lineup that also brought in the banjo player Justin Jenkins. He stayed with the band for several years; tracks he recorded with it are on Grasstowne 4, which Mountain Fever issued in 2015 under the new name Alan Bibey & Grasstowne, after he had left. In the same period he was part of the rhythm section, with Kevin McKinnon on mandolin and Keith McKinnon on guitar, on most of the banjo player Jason Davis’s album Second Time Around (Mountain Fever, 2013), and he played bass on Daniel Salyer’s self-titled EP of 2014.

In October 2014 he took over the bass in Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice from Jason Tomlin. With Davis on banjo, Jonathan Dillon on mandolin and Jamie Harper on fiddle, and Aaron Ramsey on guitar in the studio, the band recorded Poor Boy’s Pleasure (Mountain Fever, May 2016); its first single, “Longneck Blues,” sung by Sisk with Ronnie Bowman, won the IBMA’s Collaborative Recording of the Year award in 2016. In December 2015 Keller moved to the Darrell Webb Band as bassist and tenor singer, saying that Webb was based in the same part of East Tennessee as he was. He sings harmony with Jared Hensley on the gospel song “I’m Going That Way” on the band’s Lover’s Leap (Mountain Fever, 2017), by which time he had left. He was again on bass with Sisk’s touring band for “What Goes Around,” the first single from The Mountains Are Calling Me Home (Mountain Fever, 2017).

In 2018, after the Boxcars broke up, he joined the Highland Travelers, a band of Adam Steffey on mandolin, Keith Garrett on guitar, Jason Davis on banjo and Gary Hultman on resonator guitar. He played bass and sang on its self-titled album for Mountain Fever that spring, and the band ended in November 2018 when Steffey decided to take a break from music. He also played bass and sang harmony on Road Signs & Highways (Mountain Fever, 2019) by ClayBank, with Zack Arnold, Jacob Greer, Jamie Harper and Jason Davis.

In February 2020 he joined Volume Five, with Glen Harrell on fiddle, Patton Wages on banjo, Jacob Burleson on guitar and Aaron Ramsey on mandolin, a lineup that first played at the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival in Framingham, Massachusetts, on 15 February. He is on bass on the band’s “When Karma Comes Calling,” recorded in January 2021 and released that October.

On 9 July 2021 he played his first show with the Lonesome River Band, at the Reeves Theater in Elkin, North Carolina, taking the place of Barry Reed, the band’s bassist since 2010. He is on Heyday (Mountain Home, 2022) and The Winning Hand (Mountain Home, June 2024), the first full album of the lineup of Sammy Shelor, Jesse Smathers, Adam Miller, Mike Hartgrove and Keller, and he was still the band’s bassist on its single “Hit the Nail on the Head” in September 2026.