Grammy-Award winning bluegrass band The SteelDrivers brings tour to Clark State

Celebrating its 20th anniversary with a US tour and a new album, The SteelDrivers will make a stop at the Clark State Performing Arts Center in Springfield on Sept. 18.

The SteelDrivers have seen a lot of change in the past two decades. Songwriter Chris Stapleton started with the band in 2005 before departing five years in to pursue a solo career. (The band has put out more music post-Stapleton than during his time.) A few lead singers have since come and gone, with Matt Dame taking the reins in 2021. And mandolinist Brett Truitt stepped in when Mike Henderson wanted to get off the road.

Despite the lineup shifts, the band’s identity is in its consistency in songwriting.

“The band was so solid from the beginning,” said fiddler Tammy King, one of the SteelDrivers’ founding members. “Each of us individually were allowed to be exactly who we were. I’ve played the same style and way the whole time I’ve been in the band. My role in the band has been the same. From the outside, it looks like we’ve had a lot of change, but in reality we haven’t.”

In bluegrass music, there are prime examples of highly successful lead singer changes. When Carter Stanley died in the 1960s, his brother Ralph went solo and had arguably broader success than he had with his brother. In The SteelDrivers’ case, Stapleton started performing solo and the band continued to hone its soulful fusion of bluegrass, blues, rock, and country on its own.

“Outrun,” the band’s seventh LP, was self-produced and released on Sun Records. The album pays homage to the past while pushing its contemporary and signature sound forward. King penned several of the songs on “Outrun.” The album also includes a few tracks written by Henderson, who died in 2023.

With death looming large across the record, especially with the opening track doing the opposite of outrunning the issue, despite the name, one could surmise that staring death in the face is the band’s way of dealing with the loss of Henderson. Though, as a deeper dive proves, it’s just as apt to suggest that the band simply likes to sing about death.

When asked about it, King challenged the theory’s plausibility with her “high body count” quip.

Part of the fascination with death — and heartbreak and drinking and a general air of malaise — is idiomatic to the band’s genre of music; American roots music, a term that better encapsulates The SteelDrivers catalog than simply bluegrass, has an outlaw quality to it. American roots music colors outside of the lines and lets us into the idea that life is sometimes bleak.

“When you’re not trying to write for just a narrow Top 40 radio spot,” King said, “you can tell all sorts of different stories.”

The band not only has awareness about those topics, but knows how to do it in a way that’s novel. From the beginning, The SteelDrivers consciously avoided hardcore bluegrass pitfalls, namely breakneck banjos and mandolin solos overstaying their welcome, allowing the fiddle and banjo some much needed nuance.

King cites Henderson as pushing the band in that distinct direction. She also says Richard Bailey, the banjoist, is the band’s secret sauce. (King confirms I can quote her on that any day of the week.) Bailey doesn’t approach the music like a traditional banjo player, rather focusing on different grooves the seemingly one-trick-pony instrument can offer.

Many bands don’t make it to the 20 year milestone. That’s not the case for The SteelDrivers. For this US tour, the band will be performing a semi-greatest hits show, with a few songs off the new record.

Four members of the band — King, Truitt, Bailey, and Mike Fleming — have been honing their comradery for the past 13 years. When it comes to self-producing, they know what they do.

“Who better than ourselves?” King said, rhetorically. “We know how we play. There’s such an implicit level of trust and respect amongst all of us. Everybody speaks up and gets to have their musical day, which is amazing.”

Twenty years on, The SteelDrivers are still together on the road, keeping the body count climbing — one roots murder ballad at a time.

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