Richard Bailey

He grew up in Memphis, attended Bartlett High School and took up the banjo soon after starting there. He then studied commercial music production at Memphis State University and went into writing and producing advertising jingles. In Memphis he played banjo with the local bluegrass band the Tennessee Gentlemen, on their albums Just Us (1979), recorded at Al Green’s studio, and the gospel Sunday Morning (1981), and in 1981 he also played on a gospel album with Al Green. His own instrumental album, Night-Light (Ridge Runner, 1985), was recorded in Memphis and at Studio 19 in Nashville with Alan Munde on guitar, Sam Bush on fiddle, Tommy Burroughs on mandolin and Jimmy Driskell on bass, and mixed by Bailey himself; Munde wrote the sleeve notes. Its ten tracks include “Redwing,” “Casey Jones,” “My Favorite Things” and the title piece.

When the jingle business in Memphis dried up in 1987, he moved to Nashville with his friends Billy Joe Foster and Joe Diffie. There he became a regular studio banjo player: on Rhonda Vincent’s A Dream Come True (Rebel, 1990), Blaine Sprouse’s Dogwood Winter (1992), Tom Paxton’s Wearing the Time (1994), George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s One (1995), Kenny Rogers’s She Rides Wild Horses (1999) and Michael Martin Murphey’s Playing Favorites (2001), and on several of the instrumental “Pickin’ On” tribute albums of 2000–2004. He was also the banjo player in the Cluster Pluckers, a group whose albums were produced by the guitarist Mark Howard and ran from The Cluster Pluckers (1989) to Unplucked (1995), the latter with Blaine Sprouse, Brent Truitt, Darrell Scott and Roy Huskey Jr.

In 2000 he joined Roland White, Diane Bouska and others in the Roland White Band. He played banjo on its first album, Jelly on My Tofu (Copper Creek, 2002), a Grammy nominee for Best Bluegrass Album, and co-wrote its instrumental “Bermuda Drive” with David Grier; he was still in the band for Straight-Ahead Bluegrass in 2014. He also played on Roland White’s Trying to Get to You (1994) and was the banjo player on Jim Lauderdale’s The Bluegrass Diaries (Yep Roc, 2007), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2008.

The SteelDrivers came together in 2005 after a jam with Chris Stapleton and Mike Henderson, with Tammy Rogers on fiddle and Mike Fleming on bass. Bailey has played on all of the band’s albums, from a live recording at the Station Inn in November 2006 and The SteelDrivers (Rounder, 2008) through Reckless (2010), Hammer Down (2013), The Muscle Shoals Recordings (2015) and Bad for You (2020) to the gospel Tougher Than Nails (2023) and Outrun (Sun, 2025), nominated for Best Bluegrass Album at the 2026 Grammys. He has stayed through every change of lineup, and as of 2026 he, Rogers and Fleming remain from the first band, with Brent Truitt on mandolin and Matt Dame on guitar.