Tristan Scroggins

He grew up between Albuquerque and Denver. Watching his father play one of his own pieces at a festival made him want to learn the banjo, but at eight he found the instrument too big for his hands and took up the mandolin instead. At twelve he joined his first band, the Squash Blossom Boys, and at thirteen he moved to Denver with his father. As his playing developed the two performed together more and more, and with the guitarist Greg Blake they formed Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, which at its peak toured some 300 days a year and played festivals such as MerleFest and Wintergrass.

His last official show with the band was on Danny Stewart’s Bluegrass Cruise in February 2019, after which he made his home in Nashville; the band itself played its final show at the Joe Val Festival in February 2020. In Nashville he filled in on the Grand Ole Opry with Dailey & Vincent, sat in with Missy Raines and toured Ireland with Chris Jones, and he later became the mandolin player in Raines’s band Allegheny. He also played mandolin on the 2020 Pinecastle album Step Back in Time by J.B. and Jamie Dailey.

Alongside the bluegrass work he has a duo with the violinist and composer Alisa Rose, Scroggins & Rose, whom he met when both were teaching at the NimbleFingers Bluegrass and Old Time Workshop. Their instrumental music brings classical forms and arrangements into bluegrass-inspired pieces, in the line of the duets of Mike Marshall and Darol Anger. They released Grana in 2016 and recorded a second album, Curios, in Nashville, produced by Wes Corbett with the help of a FreshGrass Foundation grant. On his own he developed a crosspicking style that owes something to Jesse McReynolds; he first worked out the arrangements to pass the time on an overseas tour, and in 2019 he released Fancy Boy, bluegrass standards arranged in that style, with a book of tablature.

His writing began with a blog, The Why Lonesome Sound, in 2017, and led to a column and profiles for No Depression, a weekly mandolin column with breakdowns of individual pieces for Peghead Nation, and interviews in Banjo Newsletter and Fiddler Magazine. He played on The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol. 1, nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2021, and with the fiddler George Jackson he recorded The Old Time 100, a hundred of the fiddle tunes most often played at old-time jams, issued in volumes from February 2024 with mandolin lessons and transcriptions for his subscribers. He also teaches at camps and workshops.