Friday, Sept. 4, 2020 7:00 p.m.
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grandparents’ house, and I wasn’t into it, to be completely honest. I was a rocker. Cinderella was my favorite band before I met these guys.”
But that kind of angular perspective was more in tune with The SteelDrivers than he could have known, and his initiation into bluegrass infused a convert’s zeal into his performances. While The SteelDrivers 3.0 rehearsed and started playing shows, Tammy amm Rogers, the band’s dynamic fiddle player and harmony vocalist, leaned hard into developing new material for their latest release, “Bad for You.”
The SteelDrivers, known for their hardedged bluegrass sound, have persevered despite a few shakeups in personnel over the last decade. The band had to replace its lead singer twice, the first time in 2010, when Chris Stapleton left and went on to pursue a solo career. By that time, The SteelDrivers had already earned several Grammy nominations. It wasn’t until Gary Nichols stepped in as lead vocalist that the band eventually won its first Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2015 for “The Muscle Shoals Recordings.” In bluegrass and acoustic music circles, respect for this Nashville quintet was so strong that the win
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seemed somehow inevitable, like a box being checked off. For the band though, as well as its passionate audience of Steelheads, it was a much bigger deal. The Grammy validated the vision and collective striving of a string band with a rock and soul heart. Industry recognition and better bookings followed.
Then in 2018, just when the follow-up album was coming together, Nichols left the band and was soon replaced by Kelvin Damrell, a twenty-something rock singer from Kentucky. “I was pretty fresh to bluegrass,” Damrell says. “The only bluegrass I’d heard was couch pickin’ at my
“Having been known as a songwriting band, I felt like it was still what the band needed to do,” she says.
That a quintet could sound so consistent over time, while adding new repertoire and even new lead singers, is a testament to a classically Nashville way of thinking. “I always say we just happen to use traditional instruments, but we’re really a singer-songwriter band,” Rogers says.
One regularly hears the edict to “serve the song” among top tier players in Music City. But because this is bluegrass, and this is The SteelDrivers, the truth is that often, serving the song means you gotta play like hell.
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