Mike Compton

He was born on 29 February 1956 in Meridian, the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers. He played trombone in the school band before trying the guitar, and a Sears “Tater Bug” mandolin he was given for his fifteenth birthday set his course; with his cousin Jeffrey “Bodine” Moffett on fiddle he began playing old-time standards. A local bluegrass musician, Raymond Huffmaster, lent him his Bill Monroe records and took him to festivals, and on a trip to Bean Blossom in 1975 introduced him to Monroe himself. Compton went on to Meridian Junior College on an art scholarship.

At 21, on a summer trip to Nashville, he met the singer and guitarist Pat Enright, who had a band in the works, and he left college and moved to the city. That band never formed, and from 1977 to 1981 he played instead with Hubert Davis and the Season Travelers, the house band at Davis’s Bluegrass Inn. Davis was a former Blue Grass Boy and a Scruggs-style banjo player, and Compton appears on three of the group’s albums for RHD. Through the early 1980s he worked as a cook and as a printer at Hatch Show Print while playing around Nashville, and he joined the Bluegrass Band, with Butch Robins, Alan O’Bryant, David Sebring and Ed Dye, for its last few dates.

In 1984, when Enright and O’Bryant put the Nashville Bluegrass Band together for a long package tour, Compton was their first choice on mandolin, with Mark Hembree, fresh from Monroe’s band, on bass; the four played their first show as a band at the Station Inn on 25 August 1984. Compton, who had sung little before, took the baritone part in the band’s close harmony and a cappella numbers. He played on its first Rounder albums, My Native Home (1985), Idle Time (1986) and the gospel set To Be His Child (1987), and on New Moon Rising (1988), on which the band backed Peter Rowan.

In the summer of 1988 the band’s bus ran into the back of a tractor-trailer on Interstate 81 near Roanoke, Virginia, on the way to the Winterhawk festival, and Hembree, who was driving, was badly hurt. Not long afterwards Compton wrote his bandmates letters of resignation and left music for a time, working as a caretaker in the Catskill Mountains of New York; Roland White took over the mandolin chair. Back in Nashville in the early 1990s, he toured the United States and Japan with the guitarist David Grier, and the two made the duet album Climbing the Walls (Rounder, 1991).

In 1994, at the Tennessee Homecoming in Norris, he spent time jamming with John Hartford, who offered him a job the next day. He stayed with Hartford until Hartford’s death in June 2001 and played on his last album, Hamilton Ironworks. In the same years he produced and played mandolin on the banjo player Bill Evans’s Native and Fine (1995) and played on Butch Robins’s Grounded, Centered, Focused (1995), for which Monroe himself played on two sessions; several of its tracks are mandolin duets by Monroe and Compton. He was Monroe’s duet partner again on the fiddler Jimmy Campbell’s Pieces of Time (1996). With his old bandmates O’Bryant, Enright and Stuart Duncan he played on the Sugar Hill tribute True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and the IBMA’s Album and Recorded Event of the Year in 1997.

When T Bone Burnett asked Hartford to record old-time fiddle pieces as raw material for the soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Hartford brought Compton and the guitarist Chris Sharp, and Burnett called Compton back for more sessions; his mandolin opens “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” The soundtrack sold more than seven million copies and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002. Meanwhile Alan O’Bryant had called him in December 1999 to offer him his old place in the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and he officially rejoined in January 2000. He played in the house band that backed most of the performers at the Down from the Mountain concert at the Ryman and on the tours of 2001 and 2002. Burnett also used him on Ralph Stanley’s 2002 album Ralph Stanley and, with Stuart Duncan, on the Cold Mountain soundtrack (2003). The IBMA nominated him for Mandolin Player of the Year in 2001 and 2002, and in 2002 the Mississippi Senate honored him with Senate Resolution No. 45; on the Senate floor he played Monroe’s “Old Ebenezer Scrooge” and led the senators in “I’ll Fly Away.”

Alongside the band he recorded Stomp (Acoustic Disc, 2006) with the mandolinist David Long, whom he had met at the Mohican Bluegrass Festival in Ohio in 1999, and later made his own albums Rotten Taters (2011) and Rare & Fine: Uncommon Tunes of Bill Monroe (2022). He has also recorded Gallop to Georgia (2018) with Norman Blake, and with the fiddler and banjo player Joe Newberry he works as the duo Compton & Newberry, whose albums include Live (2012) and Home in My Heart (2024). Other groups he has played in include the John Hartford Stringband and the Helen Highwater Stringband. A teacher of Monroe-style mandolin at camps and in private lessons, he runs an annual Monroe Mandolin Camp in Nashville.