Mark Casstevens

He sang in church choirs and began piano lessons at six, then taught himself guitar. In high school in Fort Worth he played five-string banjo in the Mildew Brothers, a bluegrass and comedy trio, and during the folk boom of the 1960s he played upright bass, guitar and mandolin; a 1969 session at Columbia’s studios in Nashville set him on becoming a studio musician. As a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a BA in English in 1971, he reviewed the album Me and Jerry by Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed for a college magazine, and the fingerpicking on it, he later said, told him where he belonged. He moved to Nashville on Labor Day 1971 and worked at Opryland for two years.

He won an audition to play banjo for Ray Stevens on “The Streak” and played banjo on Stevens’s “Misty”; through Stevens he met Atkins and Reed in 1975, and the work with Stevens, his only touring job until the 1990s, brought him session calls. He took nearly every demo session he was offered before moving into the master-session pool, and over the next decades he recorded with Dolly Parton, Randy Travis, Toby Keith, Glen Campbell, Kenny Chesney, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, Alabama and the Judds. He played on eleven of Randy Travis’s albums, and he played guitar on Mac Wiseman’s If Teardrops Were Pennies (51 West, 1982), recorded at Audio Media in Nashville, including “You Are My Sunshine” and “Maple on the Hill,” and on Wiseman’s Letter Edged in Black (2001), including “Great Speckled Bird.” In 1989 he was called to be one of the G-Men, the players on all of Garth Brooks’s first nine studio albums. When Travis returned to touring in 1994 after a break, Casstevens joined his band, playing acoustic guitar, banjo and harmonica.

In 1983 Atkins brought him to his convention of fingerstyle guitarists; he did not play it again for twenty years. Encouraged after a later appearance there, he recorded Acoustic Inventions (2004), an instrumental album of his own fingerstyle compositions. He also played in the Grand Ole Opry band. He walked off the Opry stage in December 2010 and stopped playing. The G-Men were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2016.