Molly Tuttle

She was born on 14 January 1993 in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Palo Alto, the daughter of the bluegrass teacher and multi-instrumentalist Jack Tuttle. She started on guitar at eight and at eleven was playing on stage with her father. In 2006, at thirteen, she recorded a duet album with him, The Old Apple Tree, singing and playing lead guitar and clawhammer banjo, and she appeared with him on A Prairie Home Companion. At fifteen she joined the family band, the Tuttles with AJ Lee, with her brothers Sullivan on guitar and Michael on mandolin and the singer and mandolinist AJ Lee; she sang and played guitar and banjo on its albums Introducing the Tuttles with AJ Lee and Endless Ocean (2013). Among the women she has named as role models are Laurie Lewis, Kathy Kallick, Alison Krauss and Hazel Dickens.

In 2012 she went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston on merit scholarships, as the first recipient of the Foundation for Bluegrass Music’s Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship, and she also won the Chris Austin Songwriting Competition at MerleFest. At Berklee she joined the Goodbye Girls, an all-female band with Allison de Groot on banjo, Lena Jonsson on fiddle and Brittany Karlson on bass that mixed bluegrass with jazz and Swedish folk music; it released the EP Going to Boston in 2014 and the album Snowy Side of the Mountain in 2016 and toured Sweden several times. In 2014 she also made a duet EP with the fiddler John Mailander, and the two appeared as guests on the San Francisco duo the Mile Rocks’ album Mile Rocks and Friends (2015), on “Windy Mountain” and “Dream of a Miner’s Child.”

She moved from Boston to Nashville in 2015. Her guitar playing draws on crosspicking, the flatpicking technique of rolling single notes across three strings in patterns modeled on the banjo roll, and she also plays clawhammer-style on the guitar. The IBMA gave her its Momentum Award as an instrumentalist in 2016. In 2017 she signed with Alison Brown’s Compass Records and released Rise, a seven-song EP of her own songs, paid for by a crowdfunding campaign and produced by Kai Welch, with guests including Darrell Scott, the Milk Carton Kids and Kathy Kallick; on the road she led the Molly Tuttle Band, with Wes Corbett on banjo, Joe K. Walsh on mandolin and Hasee Ciaccio on bass. That year she became the first woman named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year. In 2018 she won it again, was named Instrumentalist of the Year at the Americana Music Awards, and shared the IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year with Missy Raines, Alison Brown, Becky Buller and Sierra Hull for Raines’s single “Swept Away”; the five also played together that year as the First Ladies of Bluegrass.

Her first full-length album, When You’re Ready, produced by Ryan Hewitt, came out on Compass in April 2019. In March 2020, at home in Nashville after the tornado that hit East Nashville and the start of the pandemic, she taught herself Pro Tools and recorded and engineered her own parts for …but i’d rather be with you, ten cover songs ranging from Cat Stevens and Karen Dalton to Rancid and FKA Twigs. The Los Angeles producer Tony Berg added session players, among them the drummer Matt Chamberlain and the keyboard player Patrick Warren, working from their own studios, with guest vocals from Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show; it was released on 28 August 2020. The next year she was among the guests on Béla Fleck’s My Bluegrass Heart.

In 2021 she put together Golden Highway, with Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Kyle Tuttle on banjo and Shelby Means on bass, and moved to Nonesuch Records. Singing lead and playing acoustic guitar, she made two albums with the band, both co-produced with Jerry Douglas: Crooked Tree (April 2022), recorded live at Ocean Way in Nashville, every song written or co-written by her and eight of the thirteen with Secor, with guests including Billy Strings, Sierra Hull, Margo Price, Gillian Welch, Dan Tyminski and Old Crow Medicine Show; and City of Gold (July 2023), recorded at Sound Emporium and mostly written with Secor. Both won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and the IBMA’s Album of the Year, and the title song of Crooked Tree, written with Melody Walker, was the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 2023. At the 2023 Grammys she was also nominated for Best New Artist, and the IBMA named her Female Vocalist of the Year in 2022 and 2023. In 2022 she played on Dan Tyminski’s Tony Rice tribute EP, One More Time Before You Go, on “Church Street Blues.”

In May 2025 she broke up Golden Highway, several of whose members were starting solo careers, and announced a new touring band with Mair Meyer on mandolin, Ellen Angelico on electric and steel guitar, Vanessa McGowan on bass and Megan Jane on drums. Between the band albums she had released a six-song EP, Into the Wild (2024). Her fifth full album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine (Nonesuch, 15 August 2025), produced by Jay Joyce in Nashville, mixes pop, country and rock with flatpicking and is the first of her albums on which she plays banjo; most of its songs were written with Secor, who also plays banjo, fiddle and harmonica on it. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Americana Album at the 2026 awards, and its single “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark” for Best Americana Performance. Earlier in 2025 she sang and played guitar on Ringo Starr’s country album Look Up and played on his televised Ringo & Friends shows at the Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry.