Mike Scott

He was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, on 14 May 1962. His parents gave him a banjo for Christmas in 1972, when he was ten, and within a year he was playing in his first band, the Rocky Mountain Boys, around East Tennessee. From 1974 to 1977 he played in the Tennessee Bluegrass Four, a band of children billed at festivals as the youngest bluegrass band in the East, and then with the Cumberland Mountain Boys. At the end of his last year of high school he joined Carl Story’s Rambling Mountaineers, and he worked with Story for just over two years, from 1979 into 1982.

He joined Jim & Jesse & the Virginia Boys at the Grand Ole Opry on 4 February 1983, at twenty, and toured with them for nearly four years in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. Because the band already had a banjo player, the former Virginia Boy Allen Shelton, who came back in those years, played five-string Dobro alongside him, with occasional twin banjo numbers. Scott played banjo on the brothers’ 1983 album Homeland Harmony (Double J), recorded at the Upstairs Studio in Gallatin, Tennessee, with Steve Thomas on fiddle and Keith McReynolds on bass. After leaving in 1986 he formed his own group, Mike Scott & the All American Band, later the Nashville Band, and he went on playing occasional Opry shows and tour dates with Jim & Jesse and, after Jim McReynolds’s death at the end of 2002, with Jesse McReynolds. From 1998 to 2006 he also worked dates with Danny Davis & the Nashville Brass.

In October 2001 he joined Ronnie Reno & the Reno Tradition, and he stayed until Reno retired from touring in October 2019. With Reno he was part of the house band on Reno’s Old Time Music on RFD-TV, where he was often featured in the show’s “Super Pickers” segment. He played on Reno’s Portfolio (2002) and on Lessons Learned (Rural Rhythm, March 2015), nine new Reno songs recorded with the Reno Tradition, with Scott on banjo, John Maberry on mandolin, Steve Day on fiddle and Heath Van Winkle on bass. In July 2012 he sat in on banjo on Tony Holt and the Wildwood Valley Boys’ tour of Norway, the Netherlands and Scotland. He has also hosted Rural Rhythm Records’ program Behind the Dream on Blue Highways TV and teaches banjo at music workshops; he marked fifty years as a performer in December 2022.