Mike Barber

Musician
Best known for Bass

Mike Barber is an upright bass player from upstate New York who has played with the Gibson Brothers since 1993 and co-produced many of their albums, so long a fixture that he is often called “the third Gibson Brother.” He was in the band through its IBMA Emerging Artist award in 1998 and its Entertainer of the Year awards in 2012 and 2013.

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His father, Junior Barber, was a resonator guitarist well respected in upstate New York who had mentored Eric and Leigh Gibson as young players. In 1993 the brothers brought both Barbers into their band, Junior on Dobro and Mike on bass, in time for their first album, Underneath a Harvest Moon (Big Elm, 1994). Father and son played on every track of the three Hay Holler albums that followed, Long Forgotten Dream (1996), Spread Your Wings (1997) and Another Night of Waiting (1998), which won the band the IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year award in 1998. Junior retired from the band in 2002 and was succeeded by the fiddler Clayton Campbell, though he returned as a guest on Iron & Diamonds (2008).

Mike stayed on bass through the band’s Sugar Hill albums, Bona Fide (2003), on one track of which he also plays boogie-woogie guitar, Long Way Back Home (2004), Red Letter Day (2006) and Iron & Diamonds (2008), and on to Compass, where he began sharing the production credit with the brothers. Help My Brother (2011), which the three produced, was the IBMA’s Album of the Year, and their recording of Joe Newberry’s “Singing as We Rise” with Ricky Skaggs, also produced with Barber, was its Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year in 2012. He had co-producer credit again on They Called It Music (2013), and the band, with Barber, Campbell and the mandolinist Joe Walsh, was named Entertainer of the Year in 2012 and 2013 and Vocal Group of the Year in 2011 and 2013.

At Rounder he played bass on Brotherhood (2015) and In the Ground (2017), whose “I Found a Church Today,” produced by the Gibsons and Barber, shared the IBMA’s Gospel Recorded Performance award for 2017. By 2016 he had co-produced the band’s last six albums. He is the bassist on Darkest Hour, produced by Jerry Douglas and released on Bull Run in January 2023, and in October 2021 he was still on the road with the brothers, alongside Shawn Lane on mandolin. He has also taught bass at the Augusta Heritage workshops in West Virginia and the Kluane Mountain camp in the Yukon.

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