Mike Fleming
Mike Fleming is the bass player and baritone singer of the SteelDrivers, which he helped found in Nashville in 2005 and has played in through every change of lineup since. A banjo player first, he had played bluegrass with the band’s co-founder Mike Henderson since their college days in Missouri, and he won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album with the band for The Muscle Shoals Recordings.
He grew up partly in Indiana, where as a sixth-grader he saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and got a guitar. Bluegrass came later, at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he met Henderson in the early 1970s and heard the banjo in the film Deliverance. The two shared a house full of music and had a regional bluegrass band for about seven years, Fleming on banjo and guitar and Henderson on fiddle, mandolin and National slide guitar. On Labor Day weekend in 1980, with the band’s van broken down on a Kansas roadside, Fleming decided it was time to try something else, and back in Missouri the two went separate ways: Fleming to play country shows in the Ozarks, Henderson to electric blues and, from 1985, to Nashville.
Nearly ten years later Henderson called and told him that if he wanted to play music for keeps he should come to Nashville. There Fleming worked as a sideman, recording with Holly Dunn, Joy Lynn White and the songwriter David Olney and touring with Dunn and with Kevin Welch, with appearances on Austin City Limits, Nashville Now and the Grand Ole Opry. By then he called himself a recovering banjo player.
In the summer of 2005 Henderson and Chris Stapleton, who had been writing songs together for several years, called him to play bass in an acoustic band meant for a weekly night around town, with Tammy Rogers on fiddle and Richard Bailey on banjo. Fleming has recalled learning Flatt & Scruggs’s “Sleep With One Eye Open” the first night before the others brought out new songs such as “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey.” He played bass on the band’s live recording at the Station Inn in November 2006 and on all of its Rounder albums: The SteelDrivers (2008), Reckless (2010), Hammer Down (2013), The Muscle Shoals Recordings (2015) and Bad for You (2020), on which he also sings harmony throughout. The Muscle Shoals Recordings won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 58th Grammy Awards.
The band lost Stapleton in 2010 and Henderson at the end of 2011, and went through several lead singers after that, but Fleming, Rogers and Bailey stayed. He is on the band’s first gospel album, Tougher Than Nails (Gaither), released on 8 September 2023, two weeks before Henderson died, and on Outrun (Sun Records, 2025), which was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. As of 2025 the band was Fleming, Rogers, Bailey, the mandolinist Brent Truitt and the singer and guitarist Matt Dame.
