Teri Chism
Teri Chism is a bass player and singer from the Washington, D.C., bluegrass scene who played with Patent Pending and Cliff Waldron & the New Shades of Grass, played in Bill Emerson’s Sweet Dixie from 2007, and in 2014 also joined the West Virginia band Circa Blue. She sings lead as well as harmony, often alongside her husband, the mandolinist Wayne Lanham.
Her early work in the D.C. area was with Patent Pending and with Cliff Waldron’s New Shades of Grass. When Waldron retired, she and Lanham went to work with the banjo player Bill Emerson. In 2007, as Emerson launched Sweet Dixie with players from the Navy’s Country Current, he hired the couple for the touring band, Lanham on mandolin and Chism on bass, because his Navy bandmates could not travel full time.
She played bass on Sweet Dixie’s Rural Rhythm albums Southern (12 January 2010), The Touch of Time (31 January 2012) and Dancin’ Annie (2014). In 2012 she sang lead on “Baby,” for which the band made a video. On Dancin’ Annie, recorded at Phoenix Studio in Browntown, Virginia, with Chris Stifel on guitar, she sang lead on Liz Meyer’s “The Only Wind That Blows,” “Two Hands on the Wheel” and Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” and she took the lead on “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” one of the new tracks on the band’s gospel compilation of early 2016. When Tom Adams replaced Stifel in July 2014, the band was Emerson, Adams, Lanham and Chism, and that lineup backed Emerson and his son Billy on the EP Emerson 414 (2019), with Chism on bass and vocals, and on their 2020 single, The Band’s “Ophelia.”
In November 2014 Circa Blue announced her as its bassist, sharing lead and harmony vocals with Steve Harris on guitar, Ron Webb on mandolin, Matt Hickman on banjo and Malia Furtado on fiddle. In December 2020 the band released Roger Miller’s “Old Toy Trains” as a Christmas single, sung by Chism and Harris, with Lanham on mandolin, fiddle and harmony.
