Nashville Bluegrass Band's sound defies placement inside standard bluegrass distinctions between traditional and progressive styles. Composed of elite Nashville players who prioritized forging a collective voice over showcasing solo skills, the group delivers both time-honored bluegrass pieces and newer material by songwriters such as Gillian Welch and Kate Campbell with identical fluency. Observers have singled out their tight vocal harmonies and, uniquely among bluegrass ensembles, their exploration of the African-American origins behind numerous contemporary harmony approaches.
The quartet that first formed the Nashville Bluegrass Band—banjoist Alan O'Bryant, guitarist and vocalist Pat Enright, mandolinist Mike Compton, and bassist Mark Hembree—assembled in 1984 as the support unit for a tour headlined by country veterans Vernon Oxford and Minnie Pearl. Each participant already possessed extensive experience on the Nashville circuit and prior stints with leading bluegrass groups during the 1970s; Enright, for instance, had played in the progressive supergroup the Dreadful Snakes. The band secured a contract with Rounder Records, and its first album, My Native Home, appeared in 1985. Béla Fleck produced the record, which signaled its forward-looking direction from the opening track—an a cappella rendering of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Up Above My Head." My Native Home stood among several projects through which the ensemble revisited Black gospel traditions, especially the virtuoso harmony singing of the decades surrounding World War II. The entirely gospel-oriented 1987 release To Be His Child incorporated multiple selections of African-American provenance, while in 1991 the Nashville Bluegrass Band issued a full-length album, Home of the Blues, that featured guest vocals from the Fairfield Four. Such a collaboration was unprecedented within the overwhelmingly white domain of bluegrass, yet it elevated the group to prominent touring status far outside conventional festival routes. Occasionally appearing jointly with the Fairfield Four, the band played major U.S. folk venues and became the first bluegrass act to perform in the People's Republic of China, ultimately visiting nearly twenty countries across five continents.
Personnel shifted over time: Gene Libbea succeeded Hembree and Roland White took Compton's place, while fiddler Stuart Duncan participated on every recording beginning with the 1986 album Idletime. The ensemble nevertheless sustained a coherent sonic identity and enjoyed robust commercial performance across multiple releases spanning the late 1980s and much of the 1990s. With the 1988 album New Moon Rising, issued on Sugar Hill and featuring Peter Rowan and Maura O'Connell, the band changed labels; throughout the following decade it worked predominantly with producer Jerry Douglas. Following the Grammy-nominated 1998 project American Beauty, the departure of Libbea and White for separate endeavors suggested the close of an accomplished run. The Nashville Bluegrass Band nevertheless found renewed momentum once Enright supplied one of the voices for the Soggy Bottom Boys, the fictional old-time trio portrayed onscreen by George Clooney in the surprise hit film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (the remaining voices belonged to Dan Tyminski and Harley Allen). Compton and Duncan also contributed to the movie's soundtrack, and Compton joined the Down from the Mountain ensemble that accompanied the array of bluegrass artists featured in the accompanying concert tour and documentary. These developments yielded a reconfigured Nashville Bluegrass Band that again included bassist Dennis Crouch, a student of original bassist Mark Hembree, along with Compton's return on mandolin. The group mounted extensive tours in 2002 and 2003.
