Terry Eldredge

Terry Wayne Eldredge was born on 18 April 1963 in West Terre Haute, Indiana. He started out playing bass for the long-time Grand Ole Opry stars Lonzo and Oscar.

In 1988 he joined the Osborne Brothers, first on bass, as on their Sugar Hill gospel album Singing, Shouting Praises (1988), and soon on rhythm guitar, adding his lead and low tenor voice to Bobby and Sonny Osborne’s trios. He is on their CMH album Hillbilly Fever (1991) and on their run of Pinecastle albums, When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland (1994), The Ernest Tubb Song Folio (1995), Class of ’96 (1996), Hyden (1998), Dayton to Knoxville, 1949–1954 (2000) and Detroit to Wheeling (2003). His two Pinecastle solo albums, Your Own Set of Rules (1992) and Making the Rounds (1994), were made with members and friends of the band, among them Bobby and Sonny, Gene Wooten, Terry Smith, David Crow, Glen Duncan and Larry Perkins; Pinecastle reissued both in 2007, and Sonny Osborne also produced records for him. In the early 1990s he also worked often with Bill Monroe, mainly on the Opry and at a couple of festivals, and filled in for him three times, on the Opry, at the Opryland bluegrass festival and at Monroe’s own festival at Bean Blossom.

At the end of the 1990s he took up the bass again in Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time, which brought him an IBMA nomination for Bass Player of the Year in 2003. In the same years he sang and played on Larry Perkins’s A Touch of the Past (1993), played guitar on Mac, Doc & Del (1998), sang on Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001) and recorded with the Sidemen, the Station Inn’s Tuesday-night band, with Dierks Bentley, and with Dolly Parton as a member of her Blueniques. In 2002 he sang lead on “Nine Pound Hammer” and “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies” on Bluegrass: Nashville’s Superpickers, credited to the Little Grasscals, with Dave Talbot on banjo, Jamie Johnson singing tenor, and Mike Compton, Jason Carter, Mike Bub and Rob Ickes.

In February 2004 Eldredge, Johnson, Talbot and the fiddler Jimmy Mattingly asked Terry Smith and Danny Roberts to join their new band, the Grascals, which within months was touring as Dolly Parton’s opening act and backing band. He played guitar and sang on their albums from The Grascals (Rounder, 2005) through Long List of Heartaches (2006), The Famous Lefty Flynn’s (2010) and Life Finds a Way (Mountain Home, 2012), and the band was IBMA’s Entertainer of the Year in 2006 and 2007. He left the Grascals in February 2019.

For a time he stepped away from the stage. Early in 2022 he was singing again, in the No Joke Jimmy’s, a Nashville side project put together by Jamie Johnson with Ron Stewart, Brandon Rickman and others, and doing shows with the Farm Hands. He plays bass on Tim Graves & the Farm Hands’ Pinecastle album Bluegrass DNA, with Don Wayne Reno on banjo and Jimmy Haynes on guitar, and he was still the band’s bassist in October 2026.