Lynn Morris

She was born in San Antonio on 8 October 1948 and raised in Lamesa, Texas, where she grew up on the country records of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton. She had piano lessons at six and taught herself guitar chords by ear at eleven. At a boarding school in Colorado Springs she took up folk music and classical guitar, and at Colorado College she heard a bluegrass band from Denver, with Charles Sawtelle on guitar and Mary Stribling on bass, and fell for the five-string banjo, learning on a banjo borrowed from her sister.

After graduating with an art degree in 1972 she moved to Denver and co-founded the City Limits Bluegrass Band with Stribling and Pat Rossiter, playing banjo and some guitar and taking lead vocals on part of the repertoire. The trio lasted six years and made two albums for Biscuit City, Hello City Limits (1975) and Live! At the Oxford Hotel (1976). In 1974 she won the National Bluegrass Banjo Championship at Winfield, the first woman to take the title, and in 1981 she became the first player to win it a second time. After City Limits she played ski lodges around Aspen in a duo called Fire on the Mountain, spent about two years in the country band Little Smoke, with which she made two USO tours, and in 1981 moved to North Carolina to play with Cherokee Rose.

Through Pete Wernick she auditioned for Whetstone Run, a band based in State College, Pennsylvania. While she waited to hear, she sat in at a jam session in Austin and met the bassist and singer Marshall Wilborn, and when Whetstone Run’s bass player left a few months later the band hired him on her recommendation. With Lee Olsen on mandolin and Mike Gorrell on guitar, the two were in Whetstone Run from 1982 to 1986, appearing on The Nashville Network’s Fire on the Mountain in November 1983 and recording No Use Frettin’ (Red Dog, 1984), on which she played guitar and banjo and sang tenor. When the band broke up, Wilborn joined the Johnson Mountain Boys and the couple settled in Winchester, Virginia; Morris toured with Laurie Lewis in 1987.

When the Johnson Mountain Boys stopped full-time work in 1988, Morris, Wilborn and the banjo player Tom Adams formed a new band, and at Adams’s suggestion it carried her name. For the first time she was a bandleader and the lead singer and rhythm guitarist rather than the banjo player, though she kept some clawhammer banjo in the shows and on records. Their showcase at the IBMA convention that October led to a contract with Rounder, and she and Wilborn married in 1989. The Lynn Morris Band (1990), with Ronnie McCoury as guest mandolinist, placed five songs in the top twenty-two of Bluegrass Unlimited’s national radio survey, and The Bramble and the Rose (1992), which mixed songs by Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Tom T. Hall and Jim Eanes with her own “Love Grown Cold,” topped the magazine’s album chart and stayed in its top ten for nine months. In 1991 she became the first woman elected to the IBMA’s board of directors, and in 1992 the band made its Grand Ole Opry debut.

Mama’s Hand (1995), with David McLaughlin on mandolin, took its title from a Hazel Dickens song Morris had heard on the radio; it went to the top of the Bluegrass Unlimited survey and was the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 1996. When Adams and the touring mandolinist Audie Blaylock left, she and Wilborn rebuilt the band with Ron Stewart on banjo and fiddle and Jesse Brock on mandolin, and that quartet made You’ll Never Be the Sun (1999), which included country songs from George Jones, Crystal Gayle and Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s duet “If Teardrops Were Pennies,” sung with Wilborn, and Shape of a Tear (2003). She was also one of the singers on Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass, the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2001, and recorded a clawhammer banjo lesson for the Murphy Method. From 1993 the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America named her its traditional Female Vocalist of the Year ten times.

A stroke in March 2003 took her off the road and out of the studio, and the band’s touring ended. By 2009 she was running sound for Bill Emerson and the Sweet Dixie Band, and in 2011, at the Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester, she joined Wilborn and several former band members on stage and sang in public for the first time in eight years. The IBMA gave her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2010, and she was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2021.