By Greg Cahill | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings
Ask fiddler, singer, and songwriter Tammy Rogers what makes a great fiddle song and she doesn’t skip a beat: “For me, melody,” she says, enthusiastically, during a phone call from her Nashville home. “It’s such a melodic instrument. I mean, certainly in more modern times, you know, we can all point to Darol Anger as the guy that really developed melodicism with the instrument, having developed the chop. And Tracy Silverman has this strong bowing. There are a lot of cool new techniques out there, and that’s really important—it’s great to be able to add that and I certainly use that with the SteelDrivers a lot.
Advertisement
“So, to me, the instrument sings when it’s playing a beautiful melody.”
As a cofounder of the Nashville-based SteelDrivers, hard-working champions of modern bluegrass, Rogers has been at the vanguard of the modern bluegrass movement, blending traditional bluegrass, country, soul, and gospel music. Along the way, the band has picked up a Grammy Award and four Grammy nominations, as well as prestigious International Bluegrass Music Association awards. The current lineup features Rogers (fiddle), Brent Truitt (mandolin), Matt Dame (vocals and guitars), Richard Bailey (banjo), and Mike Fleming (bass).
Newly signed to the legendary Memphis-based Sun Records, the band is marking its 20th anniversary with a new album, Outrun, and a national anniversary tour. “I never thought we’d be celebrating 20 years,” Rogers says. “When you start out something like this, you just can’t foresee the future. You never think, ‘Wow, this is gonna last a long time.’ But it has.”
Outrun is the follow-up to 2023’s gospel-oriented Tougher than Nails. “We don’t historically do records every year; we’ve typically spaced them three or four years apart,” she says. “At one point, it was five years between, so we just kind of make them when we feel like it’s done and when we have the right material. But Sun Records showed up last summer and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do something with the SteelDrivers,’ and it was such an out-of-the-blue request and all of that. The guys just went, ‘Oh, well, let’s take that meeting.’”
Born in Tennessee, Rogers relocated to the Lone Star State as a child when her family moved to Irving, Texas, outside of Dallas. At ten, Rogers picked up the fiddle. Actually, she picked up the violin and received both bluegrass and classical training. Her father, a self-taught bluegrass musician, provided the initial inspiration and taught Rogers her first fiddle tunes, but she also benefitted from a robust public-school orchestral program. “I played all the way through school,” she says. “This was in Texas. And it was so fabulous at the time that they had a really great string program statewide. I fell in love with the ability to play with other people and jamming and learning things by ear and constantly, you know, being able to express myself in that way. From a very young age, I loved the soulful quality of the blues element in bluegrass. I mean, I can remember going into a festival at ten years old and getting to see Keith Whitley with Ralph Stanley—most ten-year-olds wouldn’t be bowled over by that, but these were huge moments, and I’ll never forget them. Being from East Tennessee, and from the mountains, it just resonated with me in a huge way.”
In junior high, she joined the school orchestra, won orchestral competitions, and studied violin with the same teacher that tutored the Chicks [formerly the Dixie Chicks] fiddler Martie Maguire. Eventually, she enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas on a violin studies scholarship and completed a degree in classical violin at Belmont University in Nashville.
It wasn’t the flat, dusty plains of Texas but the tuneful hills and hollers of the Appalachian Mountains that sounded the clarion call for Rogers. After graduation, she quickly settled into Nashville, bluegrass, and country music as a career path. “I just think I was so hooked on the bluegrass thing,” she says. “Early on, I was hooked on these songs and the singing, and I started singing harmony, you know, as a young teenager, so that’s always been a big part of what I’ve done.”
Advertisement
Soon Rogers landed a job in country star Patty Loveless’ backing band, the first in a long string of gigs with top female country singers, an experience that contributed to her commitment to melody. “I have been able to somehow work with the greatest country singers, a couple of generations, to be honest,” she says. “I’ve gotten to work with Emmylou Harris, who, you know, starting from the early to mid-’70s, just has made some of the most iconic records ever. And then, you know, Patty, who’s now considered one of the greatest traditional singers ever, and on to Trisha [Yearwood], having one of the most glorious voices, and Linda Ronstadt. And, then working into the 2000s with Reba McEntire. I mean, these are just, like, iconic people. The thing that speaks to me is just their integrity and their dedication to their art.
“It’s all about the song and the way they sing it and then the way their arrangements are set up. You realize that everything is in service to the song—the singer, the instruments, the arrangement, and everything—and that probably has had more to do with shaping me as a musician and as a player as anything.”
The training she earned while working in backup bands, and as a session player, as well as a solo recording and performing artist, proved crucial w dhen Rogers cofounded the SteelDrivers. How did the band come together? “That’s kind of its own mythology these days, but the truth of the matter is, Mike Henderson, our founding mandolin player and main songwriter, had been writing with a young upstart named Chris Stapleton. I had worked with Mike back in the mid-’90s—we were both part of an independent label here in Nashville called Dead Reckoning. So, we were buddies, and we put a lot of projects together and played on records together. Fast forward to the summer of 2005, I get a call out of the blue, and it’s Mike, and he said he knew that I’d grown up playing in a family bluegrass band. And, he said, ‘Hey, uh, how about coming over and playing a little bluegrass?’
“I was like, ‘Wow.’ At that point, I’d been living in Nashville for about 15 years, and though I’d played bluegrass every now and again when somebody would have something on a recording session, it was mainly as a studio musician, you know, playing something that had a bluegrass flavor, but not anything that was seriously hardcore.
“I just told him, ‘It sounds like fun.’”
Initially, the SteelDrivers lineup featured Rogers, Stapleton (guitar and vocals), Henderson (mandolin), Richard Bailey (banjo), and Mike Fleming (bass). The band’s 2008 self-titled debut album, featuring the rough-and-tumble sound of singer Stapleton, earned a Grammy nomination (for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals) for their song “Blue Side of the Mountain.” The 2010 follow-up album, Reckless, was nominated for both Best Bluegrass Album and Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for the song “Where Rainbows Never Die.”
A few weeks later, Stapleton announced he was leaving the band to pursue a solo career—he’s now a country superstar. The news came as something of a shock to Rogers and the other members. “Well, the transition wasn’t easy, as you can imagine,” Rogers says. “I mean, any band that loses a lead singer. . . . Suddenly, there’s always the question of what are you gonna sound like? Are you going to want to go in a completely different direction or try to find somebody that sounds like that person? What exactly is gonna happen?
“So we kind of went on the down-low and had a couple of different guys that really had different sounding voices from Chris come in and sing. It didn’t work. Not that they weren’t great, because they were, but, it just wasn’t the same.”
Advertisement
Eventually, the band found Gary Nichols, who had his own signature raspy growl.
“It was amazing how well it worked,” Rogers says. Nichols fronted the SteelDrivers for seven years before he left the band for personal reasons. Guitarist Matt Dame is now on lead vocals.
One thing that strikes you about Rogers is the sheer joy she shows whenever she picks up a fiddle. And even when she talks about the fiddle. On YouTube, there’s a 20-or-so-year-old video of Rogers performing in an unidentified bluegrass trio with a guitarist and mandolinist. She’s cradling a hardanger fiddle, playing a Norwegian-colored folk song, and smiling blissfully. “In my mid-20s, there was a Tower Records Store not far from my house, and I would go in there, and it’s like I had stepped out of what I jokingly called at the time the bluegrass vacuum,” she says. “I mean, really up until about age 25, I hadn’t played anything but bluegrass. So I suddenly got exposed to a bunch of world music because I would go into Tower Records—and they had a tremendous world-music department and all sorts of different records. Anything that looked like it had a fiddle or a mandolin on it, I would buy it.
“I was fortunate at the time that I had a good job.”
Buying eight or ten CDs at a time, Rogers started to educate herself about folk music traditions from around the globe. “Suddenly, I was listening to Romanian folk music and Celtic music, and I started realizing, ‘Oh, there are all these other sounds. I mean, I was aware of Celtic music. Obviously, [being] from the Appalachians, I knew its relation to the history of bluegrass, and I knew some of those little tunes. But I started collecting some of those instruments. Before that, I had never even heard of a hardanger fiddle. A guy here in Nashville told me, ‘Oh, you gotta have one of these.’ He literally brought one back from New York and gave it to me.”
It wasn’t long before Rogers was incorporating these global sounds into her session work. “It’s all about, again, to me, the sound,” she says. “When you really start jumping into the specific style, there’s so much that’s idiosyncratic about the instrument, but there’s also a lot of overlap, for example, between Norwegian folk music and Irish folk music and then Romanian folk music and American fiddle music. It all, to me, kind of blends in.”
Advertisement
You can hear those diverse influences in her music, just like you can hear the ever-present joy that springs from her fiddle.
“I had a fairly big birthday last month [she turned 60], and, you know, I remember waking up and going, ‘I am blessed beyond measure,’” she says. “When you reach a certain age, and you can look back, you certainly get a chunk of time. And I’m so thankful and grateful for each and every opportunity. I can’t believe it sometimes that I’ve had these opportunities—
more than I ever dreamed possible. Truly beyond my wildest imagination.”
What Tammy Rogers Plays
Tammy Rogers plays a violin made by Eugen Meinel of Markneukirchen, Germany, in the mid-1920s. “It is extremely well balanced, and it has a big, beefy tone. For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to German violins,” Rogers says. “I don’t know if it’s the darker color than the French or Italian, but for what I need it for, it’s amazing.”
Her bow was built in the 1920s by German maker Otto A. Hoyer, a student of the French bow master Eugène Sartory. “It’s quick and responsive,” she says.
Rogers uses medium-gauge Thomastik-Infeld Super-Flexible Rope Core strings, although she also has used flatwound strings.
—GC
Advertisement
