SteelDrivers
Show: Friday at the Barns at Wolf Trap. Show starts at 8 p.m. 703-255-1849. wolftrap.org. $27-$30.
By the standard logic of the music industry, the SteelDrivers should have collapsed when lead singer and chief songwriter Chris Stapleton left the Grammy Award-nominated bluegrass band in 2010, followed a year later by fellow songwriter Mike Henderson.
But the SteelDrivers defied the odds. The surviving trio of fiddler Tammy Rogers, banjoist Richard Bailey and bassist Mike Fleming replaced Stapleton with Gary Nichols, a similarly roughened and robust baritone, and replaced Henderson with Brent Truitt, a similarly bluesy mandolinist. This revamped lineup released the impressive album "Hammer Down" in 2013 and the even better "Muscle Shoals Recordings" in 2015.
Despite the personnel turnover, neither the band’s signature sound nor the quality of the songwriting has changed much. It’s still a bluegrass band drenched in the blues and obsessed with the temptations and costs of alcohol, infidelity and violence. The new album features two guest appearances by fan Jason Isbell as well as new songs by alumni Stapleton, who won the best new artist award from the Country Music Association in November, and Henderson. But it’s Nichols’s heart-on-a-sleeve growl and Rogers’s slashing fiddle lines that make the SteelDrivers’ future as important as their past.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLSwtc2gpq6sl6q2pbGOpqysoZNkwamxjKyrnp2cmb%2BqwsSrqmabn6PBqrrUnmStp12ZsqfFjK2fnmWfmbG0e5FpaG9nYGh8coOOaWqanGJlgHV5xG9qcGVhZrJ2ecGcZ3FlY5p9dK2Um2tqcWFlrLTAzquwZ6Ckork%3D