Nancy Blake

She was born Nancy Ann Short in Independence on 11 June 1952. She took up the cello at twelve and moved to Nashville, where she played it with the Nashville Youth Symphony. In 1972 her band, Natchez Trace, opened a show for Norman Blake, then a Nashville session guitarist who had played with Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. The meeting led to a musical partnership in 1974 and to marriage in 1975.

From 1974 to 1977 Norman made three solo albums for Flying Fish, and she often played on them without sharing the billing. She is the cellist, credited as Nancy Ann Short, on several tracks of The Fields of November (Flying Fish, 1974), alongside Charlie Collins and Tut Taylor, and she is pictured on his Live at McCabe’s (Takoma, 1976). In 1979 the Blakes added the fiddler James Bryan to form the Rising Fawn String Ensemble. On the Rounder album Rising Fawn String Ensemble (1979) her cello is on nearly every track; on Full Moon on the Farm (Rounder, 1981) she also plays mandolin and accordion and sings a duet with Norman. On his other Rounder records of the 1980s she added mando-cello or fiddle.

Grand Junction (Rounder, 1986) was recorded in May 1985 at Rising Fawn, Georgia. All twelve pieces are instrumentals, eight of them her own compositions, along with Norman’s “Wroxall” and Scott Joplin’s “The Chrysanthemum.” She plays mandolin, piccolo mandolin, cello, guitar, bass, a single-row accordion and a five-string fiddle, with Norman on guitar, Bryan on fiddle and Tom Jackson on banjo.

The duo’s Blind Dog (Rounder, 1988) was the first of their albums nominated for the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording. She played mandolin and cello in the band Norman assembled for Norman Blake & Tony Rice 2 (Rounder, 1990), with Mark Schatz on bass and Doc Watson on guitar, and in the 1990s the couple recorded for Shanachie, where Just Gimme Somethin’ I’m Used To (1992), While Passing Along This Way (1994) and The Hobo’s Last Ride (1996) were all nominated in the same Grammy category. Shanachie also issued a concert video of the pair, My Dear Old Southern Home.

In 2001 she performed with Norman at the O Brother, Where Art Thou? concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On Back Home in Sulphur Springs (Dualtone, 2005) she plays guitar, cello and mandolin and sings harmony on most of the songs, and on Shacktown Road (Dualtone, 2007), made with the Dobro player Tut Taylor, she plays guitar and cello throughout; Rising Fawn Gathering followed in 2009. She sings “The Storms Are on the Ocean” on the soundtrack of the 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis, in which she also appears. By 2015 the couple had retired to their home in north Georgia, though she had sung on two of Norman’s later solo albums.