Laurie MacAllister
Laurie MacAllister is a singer, bassist and songwriter who co-founded the Americana trio Red Molly at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in 2004 and sang and played bass with it through its albums of 2006 to 2014. She has also made three solo albums, and in late 2024 she began performing as a solo artist.
She grew up in New Hampshire, where she spent much of her childhood listening to Simon & Garfunkel records on headphones, and as a girl she sang Dolly Parton songs into a hairbrush. Stage fright kept her from performing for a decade. While studying industrial psychology in graduate school at New York University she began going to open mics in New York City, and after a short career in management consulting and her first gigs at the Grey Dog’s Coffee in Greenwich Village she quit her job in 1998 to sing, waiting tables to get by. Her first album of original songs, These Old Clothes, came out in 1999. In 2000 she began singing backup for the songwriter Cliff Eberhardt on tour, which turned her toward harmony singing, and Eberhardt produced her second album, The Things I Choose To Do, which was first released independently and then issued by Barnes & Noble.
In 2004, late one night in a song circle at Falcon Ridge, she, Abbie Gardner and Carolann Solebello found they liked the sound of their three voices together, and they formed Red Molly, with Gardner on Dobro and MacAllister on bass. The trio released Never Been to Vegas in 2006, with “Caleb Meyer” and “Annabelle,” and two years in she was able to give up waitressing; she was soon playing about a hundred shows a year with the band. Love and Other Tragedies (2008) and James (2010), with “Tear My Stillhouse Down” and “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” followed. After hearing her voice on Never Been to Vegas, advertising executives asked her to sing the Folgers Coffee jingle for a national television commercial in 2010, her first national television work. When Solebello left in 2010, Molly Venter joined, and the trio made Light in the Sky (2011) and The Red Album (2014), produced in Nashville by Ken Coomer, which opens with MacAllister’s choice “Clinch River Blues,” a song she had been saving since 2008, and includes Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound,” which the band tied to her childhood listening, and the long-awaited “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Red Molly played MerleFest four times as a featured act and toured in Europe and Australia before going on indefinite hiatus in September 2015.
During the hiatus she made her third solo album, the self-produced The Lies the Poets Tell (2018), a set of songs by contemporary folk songwriters with duets with six male singers, among them Jimmy LaFave. In 2017 Red Molly regrouped to record the six songs of the EP One for All & All for One, released on 14 February 2018, and to play shows as a five-piece with Craig Akin on upright bass and Eben Pariser on percussion and electric guitar. In late 2024 she launched a solo career with a sold-out show at Club Passim and announced a tour of the Northeast for 2025.
