Tony Mabe
Tony Mabe is a banjo player and singer who also plays guitar and mandolin. With his wife, the singer Heather Berry Mabe, he recorded and toured as a duo from the early 2010s, played in Junior Sisk’s band from 2019, and plays banjo in Red Camel Collective, the band that grew out of Sisk’s.
He grew up in the Blue Ridge country of Virginia and North Carolina. The couple’s first album, The Heather Berry & Tony Mabe Show, came out on Mountain Fever Records in February 2012, with Tony on guitar, mandolin and banjo behind Heather’s singing and Jamie Collins on bass; it included “Tears and Roses,” a song written by Tony’s grandfather. After a few years on the bluegrass circuit they turned to church work, and Jesus Folk (2014), a gospel album, presented them as a trio with Heather on guitar, Tony on banjo and Rob Strupe on bass. In 2018 they signed with Clay Hess’s 7Flat Records, which released Old Soul: A Collection of Mountain Music in 2020, a mix of gospel songs, Carter Family numbers and modern traditional bluegrass, with Tony singing lead on the verses of “Sea of Galilee” and playing old-time banjo on “Kneel at the Cross.”
In the spring of 2019 Junior Sisk added both Mabes to his band, Tony on banjo and Heather on guitar, and their first big show together was MerleFest that April. Tony plays banjo and guitar on Sisk’s Load the Wagon (Mountain Fever, 2020), recorded at Mountain Fever Studios in Willis, Virginia, and sings bass on some of its tracks.
In December 2023 Sisk’s band, with Heather on guitar, Tony on banjo, Johnathan Dillon on mandolin and Curt Love on bass, signed with Pinecastle Records as Red Camel Collective, named for Sisk’s song “The Man in Red Camels,” with Heather and Tony sharing the lead vocals. Its self-titled first album was released on 21 February 2025. In January 2026 the band was invited to make its Grand Ole Opry debut that February, and in April 2026 Sisk introduced a new band of his own as Red Camel Collective prepared to go out entirely on its own later in the year.
