Zack Arnold

Guitar was his first instrument, and he learned it from the High Country multi-instrumentalist and teacher Steve Lewis. ClayBank began with Arnold on mandolin, his friend Jacob Greer on guitar, Tyler Thompson on banjo and Gary Trivette on bass, and in 2016, when Arnold was sixteen, the band won the RenoFest Band Competition. Its first album, Playing Hard to Forget (Rural Rhythm, 2016), includes two songs Arnold wrote with Greer, and he sang harmony behind Greer and Trivette. Two albums for Mountain Fever followed, No Escape (2018) and Road Signs & Highways (2019), the second with Jason Davis on banjo, Jamie Harper on fiddle and Kameron Keller on bass.

In August 2019 Sideline, the North Carolina band of the banjo player Steve Dilling, hired him to replace Troy Boone on mandolin, starting on 1 September, alongside Dilling, Jason Moore, Skip Cherryholmes, Bailey Coe and Daniel Greeson. When Josh Williams left Rhonda Vincent & the Rage in 2021, Vincent asked Arnold, whom she already knew, to fill in on guitar, and on 9 May 2021 she introduced him as the band’s newest member. He plays guitar on her version of “Wagon Wheel,” recorded in 2021 with Alison Krauss singing harmony and released in July 2024 ahead of her album Destinations and Fun Places, with Aaron McDaris on banjo, Mickey Harris on bass, Jacob Metz on reso-guitar and Adam Haynes on fiddle.