Vince Herman

The youngest of seven children, he grew up in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, on the edge of Pittsburgh, absorbing his older siblings’ records, from Motown and Stax to the British Invasion, and playing in polka bands at weddings. He had played guitar since third grade, and in eighth grade a visit to the Smoky City Folk Festival in Pittsburgh, where he watched a circle of strangers playing old-time music under a shade tree, turned him toward that repertoire. At West Virginia University in Morgantown he played in a number of bands and learned from traditional musicians, among them the fiddlers Melvin Wine and J. P. Fraley and the Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa.

He moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 1985, and on his first night in town met Emmitt at a show by Emmitt’s progressive bluegrass band, the Left Hand String Band. Herman played with that band for a short time and then formed a Cajun-jug band of his own, the Salmon Heads. When some of the Salmon Heads would not travel to a New Year’s Eve job in Crested Butte at the end of 1989, he took Emmitt and the banjo player Mark Vann instead, and the joke name they came up with on the drive, Leftover Salmon, stuck. With drums and electric instruments added to bluegrass, Cajun and rock, the band played ski-town clubs, then the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the H.O.R.D.E. tour; it recorded Ask the Fish (1995) live in Boulder and made Euphoria (1997) and The Nashville Sessions (1999) for Hollywood Records. After Vann’s death in 2002 the band carried on until it stopped performing at the end of 2004.

In March 2005 Herman and the keyboard player Chad Staehly put together Great American Taxi for a Rainforest Action Group benefit in Boulder, and the show went well enough that the band kept going; its albums include Streets of Gold (2007), Reckless Habits and Paradise Lost, and Herman played with it until 2013. Leftover Salmon returned in July 2007, and its later albums include Aquatic Hitchhiker (2012), High Country (2014) and, for Compass, Brand New Good Old Days (2021) and Grass Roots (2023), with Billy Strings on the Delmore Brothers’ “Blue Railroad Train.” In 2019 Herman formed the High Hawks with Staehly, the guitarist Adam Greuel, the fiddler Tim Carbone and Great American Taxi’s rhythm section, a country-rock band whose first album came out on LoHi Records in 2021.

During the pandemic, in August 2020, he set out on a months-long trip around the country in an RV and spent several weeks of it in Nashville, where the Davisson Brothers drew him into co-writing for the first time and he settled. The songs became Enjoy the Ride, cut live over three days in December 2021 at the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa with the producer David Ferguson, a band including Darrell Scott, Pat McLaughlin and the fiddlers Jason Carter and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, his son Silas Herman on mandolin and Tim O’Brien singing harmony, and released by LoHi on 18 November 2022. Leftover Salmon entered the Colorado Music Hall of Fame as part of its 2021 class, receiving the award at the Boulder Theater in November 2022, and for its thirty-fifth anniversary the band wrote Let’s Party About It (Compass, 2025) together with the songwriter Aaron Raitiere, a process Herman brought to the band from his Nashville co-writing.