Zion Napier

Musician

Zion Napier is a mandolin player from Indiana who formed the band the New Balance with his younger brother in 2010 and has since played with the SPBGMA band-contest winners Mashtag, Zach Top’s band Modern Tradition and the Caleb Daugherty Band.

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He started the New Balance in 2010 with his brother Caleb Smith on banjo. The Indiana group played a contemporary bluegrass mixed with gospel and older country songs, and its self-titled first album came out on Truegrass Entertainment in 2016.

He played mandolin in Mashtag, with Zach Top on guitar, Maddie Denton on fiddle, Wyatt Harman on bass and Jared Lindsay on banjo, and the band won the SPBGMA International Bluegrass Band Championship in 2017. Top, Denton, Harman and Napier, with Calib Smith on banjo, went on as Top’s band Modern Tradition, which signed with RBR Entertainment in August 2019. Napier played mandolin on Top’s self-titled bluegrass record for RBR, released after Top moved to Nashville in 2021, and on its 2022 single “Love Someone Like Me.”

By the summer of 2019 he was also the mandolinist of the Indiana-based Caleb Daugherty Band, with Kyle Clerkin on banjo, Zach Collier on bass and Kyle Ramey on fiddle, at the time of its album Burnt the Sawmill Down. Daugherty said that he and Napier found “Daylight’s Burning,” a song by Aubrey Holt, on a Wildwood Valley Boys CD while listening through the night in February 2020, and the band released it as a single on KDM Records that November. Napier was still in the band in December 2021, when he and Ramey sang the harmony vocals on its single “Christmas Carol.”

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