Vince Gill

Vincent Grant Gill was born on 12 April 1957 in Norman. His father, a federal appellate judge and part-time country musician, taught him banjo and encouraged him to play, and he soon took up guitar and other string instruments. While still in high school he joined the bluegrass band Mountain Smoke, which once opened for the rock band Kiss. At eighteen he moved to Louisville to join the Bluegrass Alliance, brought in by its banjo player Bill Millet in 1975, and on 2 December 1975, at the Starday studio in Nashville, he played guitar and Dobro and sang lead on the band’s Kentucky Blue, which includes “Lonesome Feeling.” While in Kentucky he also played briefly with Ricky Skaggs’s Boone Creek.

In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles to play in the fiddler Byron Berline’s band, Sundance. He is on rhythm guitar on Berline’s Dad’s Favorites (Rounder, 1977), plays banjo and resonator guitar on Dan Crary’s Lady’s Fancy (Rounder, 1977), and sang “Fiddler’s Dream” with Berline on the Telluride Festival Tapes (1978). He joined Pure Prairie League in 1979 and was the lead singer on its pop hit “Let Me Love You Tonight.” In January 1982, at Group IV Studios in Hollywood, he recorded the bluegrass album Here Today with David Grisman, Herb Pedersen, the fiddler Jim Buchanan and the bassist Emory Gordy Jr., singing lead on songs such as “I’ll Love Nobody But You”; Rounder released it. By then he was in Rodney Crowell’s band, the Cherry Bombs, alongside Tony Brown and Gordy, who would later produce his records.

Gill signed with RCA and moved to Nashville in 1983. His first country chart single, “Victim of Life’s Circumstances,” came early in 1984, and “Cinderella” was his first top-five hit in 1987. In the 1980s he also worked as a session player and songwriter for Rosanne Cash, Dire Straits, Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris, and on Harris’s gospel album Angel Band (1987) he played mandolin and guitar and sang tenor in a small acoustic band with Carl Jackson and Gordy.

His move to MCA brought When I Call Your Name (1989). Its title song, with Patty Loveless singing harmony, reached number 2 in 1990, won the Country Music Association’s Single and Song of the Year and gave him his first Grammy. Through the 1990s he won Grammys every year, was the CMA’s Male Vocalist of the Year from 1991 to 1995 and its Entertainer of the Year in 1993 and 1994, hosted the CMA Awards from 1992 to 2003 and won its Song of the Year four times, the last for “Go Rest High on That Mountain” (1996). He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1991, entered the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007, and has been president of the Hall of Fame’s board since 2005. His title song “High Lonesome Sound,” recorded with Alison Krauss & Union Station, was IBMA’s Song of the Year in 1997.

His bluegrass guest work runs through the whole period. He sang with Ralph Stanley on Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (Freeland, 1992) and took the lead, with Patty Loveless on tenor and Stanley on baritone, on “If That’s the Way You Feel” and “A Lonesome Night” on Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998). He played electric guitar and sang on Earl Scruggs and Friends (2001), sang lead on “All Prayed Up” on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. III (2002), sang on Michael Cleveland’s Let ’Er Go, Boys! (2006), and sang and played guitar on Alison Brown’s “Fair Weather” (2000), on Jeff White’s Right Beside You (2016) and on Tony Trischka’s Earl Jam (2024), where he sang lead on “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” “In the Resurrection Morning,” with Doyle Lawson’s Sacred Reunion, was IBMA’s Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year in 2021, and “Outrun the Rain,” on which he sang harmony for Jason Carter and Michael Cleveland, its Collaborative Recording of the Year in 2025.

In 2006 he released These Days, a four-CD set of 43 new songs; “The Reason Why” from it won a Grammy. His wife, Amy Grant, is a frequent touring and recording partner, and her Rock of Ages … Hymns & Faith, which he co-produced, won the 2005 Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album. He played in the Western swing band the Time Jumpers from 2010 to 2020 and in 2017, after Glenn Frey’s death, joined the Eagles. His most recent Grammy, his 22nd from 48 nominations, came at the 63rd awards in 2021 for “When My Amy Prays.”