Missy Raines

She was born on 6 April 1962 in Short Gap, in the state’s eastern panhandle, to parents who loved bluegrass and took her to festivals around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., from the age of five or six. After trying piano and guitar she took over the acoustic bass her father had bought for himself when she was about eleven, and she taught herself by ear from records and at festival jams; the bassist Tom Gray encouraged her from the age of twelve. As a high-school senior in 1978 she played regularly around Washington with a band called Stars and Bars, and after graduating she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, to join the progressive band Cloud Valley, with whom she recorded A Bluegrass Ensemble (1982) and Live in Europe (1985). In 1985 she filled in for Tom Gray with the Seldom Scene at the Birchmere in Alexandria.

About eight years with Eddie Adcock followed, her first experience of full-time touring. She was the bass player in Eddie and Martha Adcock’s Talk of the Town, which made two albums for CMH in 1987 and 1988, and with the Masters, Adcock’s group with Kenny Baker, Josh Graves and Jesse McReynolds, she recorded Saturday Night Fish Fry (CMH, 1990). She also played with Mac Wiseman. A stint with the Brother Boys of Johnson City, Tennessee, brought her into contact with the songwriter Ed Snodderly, an important influence on her playing and writing.

After moving to Nashville she joined Claire Lynch, with whom she spent much of the next twelve years in the Front Porch String Band, recording Silver and Gold (1997) and Love Light (2000) for Rounder. In 1998 she won her first IBMA Bass Player of the Year award and released her first album, My Place in the Sun, on her own label. With Lynch’s guitarist Jim Hurst she toured as a duo from 1998 to 2005 and made two albums for Pinecastle, Two (2000) and Synergy (2003), the second recorded at Signal Path Studios in Nashville with Raines on bass and bowed bass and singing. She played bass on Josh Williams’s Pinecastle albums Now That You’re Gone (2001) and Lonesome Highway (2004), and in 2003 she was a member of the short-lived group White House with Larry Stephenson, David Parmley, Jason Carter and Charlie Cushman. Raines and Hurst rejoined Lynch when she returned to the road in 2005, and the band recorded New Day (2006) and Crowd Favorites (2007) for Rounder before Raines left in 2008; Mark Schatz took her place. By then she had won the Bass Player award seven times, from 1998 to 2001 and in 2004, 2006 and 2007.

In 2008 she formed her own group, Missy Raines & the New Hip, with Ethan Ballinger on guitar, Jarrod Walker on mandolin and Cody Walker on drums, a band that set bluegrass playing against a jazz-tinged groove. Its albums for Compass were Inside Out (February 2009), which includes her instrumental “Ides of March,” written for her father, and New Frontier (August 2013). From 2011 she taught bass online through ArtistWorks, and in 2015 she recorded an EP with the Helen Highwater Stringband, alongside Mike Compton, David Grier and Shad Cobb. She also co-produced and played on I’ll Take Love, a Compass collection of Louisa Branscomb’s songs.

Royal Traveller (Compass, October 2018), produced by Alison Brown, put her singing and songwriting forward. Its “Swept Away” brought together the First Ladies of Bluegrass, the first women to win IBMA awards on their instruments, Raines, Brown, Becky Buller, Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle, and won the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2018; “Darlin’ Pal(s) of Mine,” with Brown and the bassists Mike Bub and Todd Phillips, won Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year in 2019; and the album was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2020. She won Bass Player of the Year again in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and in 2020 she shared Song of the Year with Becky Buller and Alison Brown as co-writer of “Chicago Barn Dance,” recorded by Special Consensus.

Her current band, Allegheny, named for the highlands of West Virginia where she grew up, is Ben Garnett on guitar, Eli Gilbert on banjo, Ellie Hakanson on fiddle and Tristan Scroggins on mandolin, a traditional, hard-driving group. With it she made Highlander (February 2024), recorded in Nashville with Brown producing and guests including Kathy Mattea, Michael Cleveland, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Darol Anger, Danny Paisley, Dudley Connell, Laurie Lewis and Rob Ickes, and Love & Trouble (Compass, 16 May 2025), her fifth album for the label, with Kathy Kallick and Laurie Lewis on “Anywhere the Wind Blows” and her own songs “Yanceyville Jail,” drawn from a childhood memory of the Camp Springs festival, and “Eula Dorsey,” written with Tony Rackley. She co-hosted the 2024 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards with John Cowan.

• 1998–2001, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2019–2021: IBMA Bass Player of the Year
• 2001: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass (Mark Newton and others)
• 2018: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, “Swept Away”
• 2019: IBMA Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year, “Darlin’ Pal(s) of Mine”
• 2020: Grammy nomination, Best Bluegrass Album, Royal Traveller
• 2020: IBMA Song of the Year, “Chicago Barn Dance” (co-writer)
• 2025: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award