Kathy Chiavola

She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, playing guitar and singing folk, blues and rock. A scholarship took her to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in voice, and she went on to a doctoral program at Indiana University, studying with the Metropolitan Opera singer Eileen Farrell. In 1978 she turned to bluegrass, country and acoustic music, and in 1980 she moved to Nashville.

There she toured as a bass player with the Doug Dillard Band, with Vassar Clements and with Country Gazette, and in the mid-1980s she formed her own group with Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck. She sang on Harley Allen’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains (Folkways, 1983), recorded in Nashville in 1982 with J. D. Crowe, Vassar Clements and Josh Graves among the players. In January 1986 she was one of the harmony singers, with Cheryl White Warren, Glen Duncan and Pat Enright, on Hazel Dickens’s It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song (Rounder, 1986), among them Dickens’s own “A Few Old Memories” and “You’ll Get No More of Me.” Her harmony work for Garth Brooks and Emmylou Harris earned her the Nashville Music Awards’ Outstanding Background Vocalist honor for 1995.

Her first album, Labor of Love (My Label, 1990), drew on Nashville’s acoustic players, with Carl Jackson, Stuart Duncan, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill and Edgar Meyer on the sessions, and included Monroe’s “Cry Cry Darling.” The Harvest (My Label, 1995) used her band, with Randy Howard on fiddle and Brent Truitt on mandolin, and guests including Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, John Cowan and Chet Atkins, who played lead guitar on “I Am a Pilgrim.” Its “Stay Away From Me” began at an informal session at Monroe’s cabin in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, on 27 July 1994, with Monroe playing mandolin and singing lead and Chiavola singing tenor. A band of Chiavola on guitar, Howard, Butch Robins on banjo and Kurt Storey on bass added its parts later. Howard was also the fiddler in her band in the United States and on ten European tours, and after his death in 1999 she made From Where I Stand: A Personal Tribute (My Label, 2001), dedicated to him and including tracks the two had recorded together. Somehow (My Label, 2007) was her first album of all original songs, with Victor Wooten, Edgar Meyer, Darrell Scott, Stuart Duncan, Jeff Coffin, Rob Ickes and the flamenco guitarists Chuscales and Yiyi among the musicians.

She was one of the women singers on Mark Newton’s Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass (Rebel), which won the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2001, and one of the chorus voices, with Emmylou Harris, Sam Bush, Tim O’Brien, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, on “Pilgrim,” the closing track of Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band’s The Mountain (E-Squared, 1999). A live album with Clements, Bobby Clark and James McKinney, A Night of Bluegrass at Sherwood Forest, appeared in 2002, and she recorded “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” for Mercury’s Hank Williams tribute A Picture of Hank. SPBGMA named her Female Vocalist of the Year in 1997. Outside bluegrass she was for several years the television voice of State Farm Insurance and Country Time Lemonade, reprised the title role of the Bell Witch Ballet with the Nashville Symphony and Nashville Ballet in October 2008, and was co-artistic director of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra’s American Song Festival. She has taught voice at Belmont University.