Matt Leadbetter

He learned the instrument from his father, and he is a third-generation bluegrass musician: his grandfather, John Leadbetter, played banjo.

In the spring of 2006 Sammy Shelor’s Lonesome River Band was recording The Road with No End for Mountain Home with a new lineup of Shannon Slaughter on guitar, Barry Berrier on bass and Jeff Parker on mandolin, and Leadbetter, then twenty-two, was brought in on dobro, with Ron Stewart on fiddle. He went on the road with the band that June, and at the end of the month the band announced him as a full-time member; the album followed in July. He stayed through the band’s 2007 changes, when Andy Ball came in on mandolin, and left in December 2007, largely to spend more time at home with his family. He then joined Marty Raybon & Full Circle.

In 2015 he released a self-titled album with Tim Stafford on guitar, Alan Bibey and Sierra Hull on mandolin, Ron Stewart and Scott Vestal on banjo, and Andy Leftwich and Tim Crouch among the fiddlers. Its instrumentals include Jerry Douglas’s “Fluxology,” Josh Graves’s “Fireball,” Buck White’s “Sassyfrass” and a slide treatment of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”; Marty Raybon, Bradley Walker and Paul Brewster were among the guest singers, and Leadbetter sang the gospel song “Down on Your Knees” himself.