Tammy Rogers
Tammy Rogers is a fiddler, singer and songwriter, a founding member of the SteelDrivers, whose The Muscle Shoals Recordings won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. A Nashville session and touring player, she worked with Patty Loveless and Trisha Yearwood, helped start the Dead Reckoning label, and wrote Terri Clark’s hit “A Little Gasoline.”
She was born in East Tennessee and grew up in Irving, Texas, in a family steeped in bluegrass; her father showed her a few chords on the mandolin when she was five, and she played festivals with the family band. She trained as a classical violinist and went to Southern Methodist University on a scholarship for classical performance before moving to Nashville and Belmont University.
Patty Loveless recruited her into her band, and she later played in Trisha Yearwood’s. As a session and touring musician she backed Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Randy Travis, Maria McKee, Rosie Flores and Kieran Kane, and recorded with Peter Case, Iris DeMent, Radney Foster, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Wynonna, Jim Lauderdale and Buddy and Julie Miller; she has played on most of Buddy Miller’s albums and counts him as a mentor. When Kane and Kevin Welch founded Dead Reckoning in the mid-1990s she joined them, with Harry Stinson and Mike Henderson among the label’s other artists, and she made three albums of her own for it, In the Red (1995, with Don Heffington), Tammy Rogers (1996) and The Speed of Love (1999), and toured with the label’s A Night of Reckoning show. With Dean Miller she wrote “A Little Gasoline,” a 2000 single for Terri Clark.
In 2005 she joined Henderson, Chris Stapleton, Mike Fleming and Richard Bailey in founding the SteelDrivers, playing fiddle and singing harmony. The band’s Rounder albums The SteelDrivers (2008), with “Heaven Sent” and “Hear the Willow Cry,” and Reckless (2010), with “Where Rainbows Never Die,” were followed by Hammer Down (2013) and The Muscle Shoals Recordings (2015), which won Best Bluegrass Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards. She stayed through every change of singer, from Stapleton to Gary Nichols, Kelvin Damrell and Matt Dame, and she is one of the band’s main writers; with Thomm Jutz she wrote “I Choose You,” a No. 1 for the band. The gospel album Tougher Than Nails (2023) included “Amazing Grace,” “Farther Along” and “Just a Little Talk with Jesus.” The SteelDrivers signed with Sun Records in 2025 and released Outrun, nominated for Best Bluegrass Album, with Rogers on fiddle in a lineup of Bailey, Fleming, Brent Truitt and Dame.
Outside the band she has led the Music City Baroque Fiddling Project, a Nashville violin program bridging classical and country fiddle styles, released Surely Will Be Singing (2022) with Jutz, and produced and developed the trio Troubadour Blue.
