Biography
Bluegrass and Americana performer Dale Ann Bradley built a career issuing recordings both independently and alongside the New Coon Creek Girls, earning notice for her understated vocal delivery and for interpreting material by U2, Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce, and Stealers Wheel. Raised in southeastern Kentucky, where she has spent nearly all her life, she is the daughter of a coal miner who also served as a Baptist minister. An unsuccessful 1988 audition for the New Coon Creek Girls led to several years of solo work in Renfro Valley before she entered the group in 1991 and appeared on its Pinecastle Records debut, The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore, issued in 1994.
Her own first collection, East Kentucky Morning, arrived in 1997 and drew chiefly on songs written with New Coon Creek associate Vicki Simmons; its standout rendering of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” propelled the set into the Top Ten on both the Gavin Americana and Bluegrass Unlimited charts while drawing widespread acclaim. The last New Coon Creek Girls album, released in 1998, carried the added credit “featuring Dale Ann Bradley,” after which the ensemble became known as Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek. On her 1999 follow-up, Old Southern Porches, she revisited Stealers Wheel’s 1973 hit “Stuck in the Middle with You,” with the now all-male Coon Creek lineup contributing.
A solo gospel project, Songs of Praise and Glory, appeared in 2001; that same year Doobie Shea Records issued Cumberland River Dreams by Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek. Mountain Home Records released the gospel-focused Send the Angels in 2004. Bradley then moved to Compass Records, which issued Catch Tomorrow in 2006, Don’t Turn Your Back in 2009, and Somewhere South of Crazy in 2011. The International Bluegrass Music Association named her Female Bluegrass Vocalist of the Year in 2007, an honor she received again in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2012.
In 2015 she returned to Pinecastle Records for Pocket Full of Keys, a release later nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album. Two years later she issued the self-titled Dale Ann Bradley.
Her own first collection, East Kentucky Morning, arrived in 1997 and drew chiefly on songs written with New Coon Creek associate Vicki Simmons; its standout rendering of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” propelled the set into the Top Ten on both the Gavin Americana and Bluegrass Unlimited charts while drawing widespread acclaim. The last New Coon Creek Girls album, released in 1998, carried the added credit “featuring Dale Ann Bradley,” after which the ensemble became known as Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek. On her 1999 follow-up, Old Southern Porches, she revisited Stealers Wheel’s 1973 hit “Stuck in the Middle with You,” with the now all-male Coon Creek lineup contributing.
A solo gospel project, Songs of Praise and Glory, appeared in 2001; that same year Doobie Shea Records issued Cumberland River Dreams by Dale Ann Bradley & Coon Creek. Mountain Home Records released the gospel-focused Send the Angels in 2004. Bradley then moved to Compass Records, which issued Catch Tomorrow in 2006, Don’t Turn Your Back in 2009, and Somewhere South of Crazy in 2011. The International Bluegrass Music Association named her Female Bluegrass Vocalist of the Year in 2007, an honor she received again in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2012.
In 2015 she returned to Pinecastle Records for Pocket Full of Keys, a release later nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album. Two years later she issued the self-titled Dale Ann Bradley.
Albums
Seven
2025
Kentucky for Me
2023
Christmas: The Mountain Way
2022
Things She Couldn't Get Over
2021
Oh Darlin'
2020
The Hard Way
2019
Dale Ann Bradley
2017
Pocket Full of Keys
2015
Don't Turn Your Back
2009
Songs of Praise & Glory
2001
Old Southern Porches
1999
East Kentucky Morning
1997
Singles
