Laurie Lewis

Musician · b. 1950 · Berkeley, California · laurielewis.com · Also a recording artist
Best known for Fiddle Lead Vocals Songwriter

Laurie Lewis is a fiddler, singer and songwriter who has been the steadiest voice in California bluegrass for fifty years, and one of the small number of writers whose songs have entered the standard repertoire. “Who Will Watch the Home Place” is sung at festivals by people who have no idea who wrote it, which is the highest compliment the tradition pays.

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  • Born September 28, 1950, in Long Beach, California, she grew up around the Bay Area folk revival, took classical violin lessons as a child, and taught herself guitar and banjo as a teenager.
  • She played in the early 1970s with the Phantoms of the Opry, a Bay Area band that also carried Pat Enright, later of the Nashville Bluegrass Band.
  • In 1975 she co-founded the Good Ol’ Persons with Kathy Kallick — one of the first all-women bluegrass bands — and stayed until 1979.
  • She then formed the Grant Street String Band, the group that made her reputation as a bandleader, and began recording under her own name with Restless Rambling Heart (1986).
  • Vern Williams and Ray Park, the Arkansas-born pair who brought hard bluegrass singing to California, were her mentors; she and Kallick made two albums of their songs, and her fiddling carries Park’s bite.
  • She was named IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year twice, in 1992 and 1994, and took the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 1994 for “Who Will Watch the Home Place.”
  • The Oak and the Laurel (1995), a duet record with her longtime partner, mandolinist Tom Rozum, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.
  • She has a Grammy for her part in True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, the 1996 multi-artist tribute she recorded with Kathy Kallick.
  • She produces as well as plays, and her work behind the desk for other artists is part of how the West Coast scene has documented itself.
  • Her later records, including And Laurie Lewis (2021), are as good as anything she has made, and she still teaches and tours out of Berkeley.

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