Travis Book
Travis Book is the bass player of the Infamous Stringdusters, which he joined after an audition in the fall of 2005, and one of the band’s singers and songwriters. With the Stringdusters he shared the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2018 for Laws of Gravity, and on his own he has made the albums Alice (2014) and Love and Other Strange Emotions (2023).
He came to bluegrass in Colorado. By his own account he discovered the music in 2001, when Yonder Mountain String Band was his favorite group, and at a picking party in Durango the bass player handed him an upright bass, the first he had ever touched. That bassist was the songwriter Benny “Burle” Galloway, who had helped Yonder Mountain get started and written some of its songs, and the meeting began a long friendship and apprenticeship of writing sessions, rehearsals, gigs and tours. The Durango scene also gave him his first bluegrass band, the Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band.
Book was living in Durango when the Stringdusters, then forming in Nashville around Andy Hall, Chris Pandolfi, Chris Eldridge, Jesse Cobb and Jeremy Garrett, auditioned bass players in the fall of 2005. He plays upright bass on the band’s first album, Fork in the Road (Sugar Hill, 2007), which included Galloway’s “Poor Boy’s Delight” and won three IBMA awards that year. He has stayed through every lineup since: after Eldridge left in 2007 and Cobb in 2011, the band settled as the quintet of Hall, Andy Falco, Pandolfi, Garrett and Book. With them he sings lead and harmony, and he was part of the band that won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy in 2018 for Laws of Gravity and was nominated again for A Tribute to Bill Monroe (2021). The band’s own fall festival, the Festy, held at Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company in Roseland, Virginia, reached its fourth year in 2013.
While he lived in Nashville and later in Virginia he went on writing with Galloway, among their songs “Tennessee Side of Things.” Around Charlottesville he played in a bluegrass trio with Falco and Pandolfi, and in December 2013 he started the Travis Book Trio with Landon Fishburne and Andy Thacker, a guitar, mandolin and bass lineup modeled on Phillips, Flinner & Grier, whose records had inspired him when he started on the bass. His solo album Alice, released in February 2014, is named after Galloway’s Martin D-35 guitar, which Book took in trade for his old bass and played at his solo shows; the record collects songs Galloway taught him and songs they wrote together.
He later settled in Brevard, North Carolina, where he built a weekly Tuesday show at the venue 185 King St. Three musicians he invited to one of those nights, the drummer Jeff Sipe, the guitarist Mike Ashworth and Tommy Maher, became the band on Love and Other Strange Emotions, released by the Stringdusters’ label Americana Vibes on 27 October 2023. It is an electric rock and Americana record with no banjo, fiddle or upright bass, on which Book played electric guitar and was, for the first time, sole producer; some of its songs had been recorded before by the Stringdusters. Its singles were “Reminds Me of You” and “Afraid of Love.”
As of early 2026 he hosted the Tuesday shows at 185 King St., produced a monthly interview and music podcast, The Travis Book Happy Hour, played a duo devoted to the songs of Jerry Garcia with Andy Falco, led the Travis Book Band, and reunited a few times a year with the Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band. He plays Upton basses.
