About Missy Raines

There’s something of Missy Raines in every song she records or performs. Whether she wrote it herself or selected it from another songwriter, she’s lived inside the story and the sound. And she wants you to experience it alongside her. 

Love & Trouble, Raines’ latest album with her band Allegheny, offers views from the highest peaks of her native West Virginia and from the deepest hollers of heartbreak. The 10 songs come to life with people, places, and stories that have caught her heart during her five-decade journey in bluegrass and beyond.

“Who I am,” Raines reflects, “is because of what I've been through, what I've seen and experienced, what I've loved, what I've been moved by.”

As a kid, Raines often traveled with her family to festivals in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the beating heart of bluegrass in the 1960s and 70s. She’d dabbled in piano and guitar, but when her father bought a bass for himself when she was 10, she picked it up and never let it go. (The same bass is still her primary instrument now.) She started performing as a young teenager, and since then she’s played with some of the greats across several generations: Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Eddie Adcock, Bobby Osborne, Alison Brown, Bill Evans, Laurie Lewis, and Claire Lynch, to name a few. In her 40s, she took on the mantle of bandleader, cementing her own legacy in the bluegrass world. 

In 1998, she became the first woman to win IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year award, and she’s won that title another nine times since, as well as IBMA awards for collaborative projects with a wide range of her bluegrass peers and a Grammy nomination for her 2018 album, Royal Traveller. Her stature and her sparkle made her a well-received host of the 2024 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards show alongside fellow bassist John Cowan.

Nearly all the songs on Love & Trouble are rooted in some moment along her path, in the people and places and feelings she wants to share with her audience for the kind of connection that lasts.

“Yanceyville Jail” stems from one of Raines’ earliest memories of bluegrass, or at least from the backstory behind it. It was the early 1970s, and she was a kid in the audience at the storied Camp Springs, North Carolina, bluegrass festival. When Jimmy Martin’s set time rolled around, festival promoter Carlton Haney walked onstage and explained that Martin wasn’t going to be performing that evening, though he’d rejoin the festivities the following day. “You’re not going to hear Jimmy sing tonight,” Raines, in a near-perfect mimic of Haney’s North Carolina drawl, recalls him explaining, “because Jimmy’s gonna spend the night in the  Yanceyville jail.” The way she’s heard it, there was a backstage scuffle between Martin and Haney before the set. The ground was muddy and tempers were high, ripe conditions for a juicy bit of bluegrass lore. Decades later, Raines has committed the story to song, told from Martin’s imagined perspective: “I’ve been in hard liquor and soft red clay / And I’ve been in some trouble here today / Roll and tumble tooth and nail / I ain’t going to the Yanceyville jail.”

Sometimes it’s like that — the story, and the song, almost writes itself. But Raines is just as adept at creating something entirely new, often from just one little spark.

The spark for “Eula Dorsey,” a co-write with Tony Rackley, was simply hearing the name in passing during a conversation with a friend. The real-life story didn’t linger, but the colorful name wouldn’t let Raines go. Fresh from her first-ever trip to Scotland, Raines was reflecting on the ties between Scotland and West Virginia, and the vast history of immigrants in America. That all came together for a story she applied to the Eula Dorsey in her mind. It is not a happy story. But it allows Raines’ voice to expand to its fullest power, and it offers a significant twist on the murder ballad trope. “I wasn’t interested,” Raines says, “in writing another song about a woman being victimized and not having an option out.” 

While some of her songs have deep roots in the past, Raines turns her keenest observations to our present day. “Coal Black Water,” about mountaintop removal mining, is the latest in a string of songs she’s selected to shine a light on the damage done to rural people in rural places by human-driven forces. (See also: “Who Needs a Mine?”, a hard look at the opioid addiction epidemic from her previous album, Highlander.) The lyrics of “Coal Black Water,” written by Nathan Bell, describe pieces of mountain blasting into the valleys, into the sky, into the streams, and along with them the past and future of people living nearby. “This world isn’t fit for beast or human,” Raines sings over a cascading, foreboding melody, “but we live like men and we work like women / And hope for better for our sons and our daughters / who are born just to drown in coal black water.”

Throughout her career, Raines has chosen her musical collaborators as carefully as she chooses her songs. On Love & Trouble, her fifth album for Compass Records and third produced by label head Alison Brown, she’s joined by California bluegrass pioneers Kathy Kallick and Laurie Lewis (“Anywhere the Wind Blows”) and Sister Sadie’s Deanie Richardson on fiddle on “Future on Ice.” And she was just as deliberate in choosing the members of her band, Allegheny. Ben Garnett (guitar), Eli Gilbert (banjo), Ellie Hakanson (fiddle), and Tristan Scroggins (mandolin) are a generation or so younger than Raines, but the bridge between them is a shared understanding of bluegrass and the possibilities within its traditions. 

 “Their love of traditional bluegrass runs as deep as mine does,” she says. “They’ve studied and listened to it and are moved by it in the same way that I am.” But even with that reverence for what’s come before, they’re not afraid to innovate.

Raines herself has built a career on finding new ways to see both the music she loves and the world around her. Much of that comes from not only playing with younger musicians, but also listening to what they have to say.

“I hate to use the cliché ‘It keeps me young,’” she says, “but it does make me keep thinking. It keeps my mind open and working and critically thinking. And I want to always continue to do that. I really don't want to end up in a place where I see things in just one way.”

Missy Raines and Allegheny released Love & Trouble on Compass Records on May 16, 2025.

”HIGHLANDER” - released Feb 2024
With her 2024 album, Highlander, bluegrass/Americana icon Missy Raines takes inventory of where she stands at this current juncture in her storied career — this melodic ode to her native West Virginia, which simultaneously serves as an ideal prism of time and space Raines peers through into the unknowns of tomorrow.

“Making this record and having this band has been sort of a homecoming,” the legendary bassist/vocalist says. “I’m at a point in my life where I’ve been able to look back at what I’ve gone through, what I’ve done, and the path I ultimately wanted to take.”

Captured in Nashville, the 10-song LP once again brings together Raines with producer Alison Brown, a bluegrass star in her own right. The record showcases Raines backed by her steadfast group Allegheny, named after the peaks and valleys of Raines’ homeland in the rural depths of Appalachia via the Mid-Atlantic.

“Lately, I’ve realized so much of the music I’ve created comes from personal experience,” Raines notes. “Songs about growing up in a small town, songs about making hard choices when you’re coming-of-age — do I stay in this remote area and try to make a living or do I leave my family behind and face what’s out there on my own?”

Choosing the latter, Raines headed for the bright lights of Nashville, ultimately garnering some of the biggest accolades in the music industry, including 14 International Bluegrass Music Association honors, with 10 being awarded for “Bass Player of the Year.” Raines’ 2018 release Royal Traveller was also nominated for a Grammy Award for “Best Bluegrass Album” in 2020.

And amid this existential quest of sorts for Raines emerges a finely-honed internal antenna within Highlander, one that places her atop this lyrical platform of personal reflection, cultural observation, and artistic cultivation.

“Maybe it’s because I’m an artist, but the best of me comes out when I feel deeply about something,” Raines says. “And I have to choose things that I feel passionate about, which will allow me to reproduce and translate those feelings musically.”

For Raines, when approaching the sacred art of singing, she’s able to visualize the words and emotions put forth through the selections on Highlander — cherished images and vivid scenes from her own continued journey conjured to the forefront of her intent.

“As a singer, it took me a while to find how my voice fits into this music that I love so much,” Raines says. “I try to tap into what I’m feeling, to convey all the energy and the drive that sets bluegrass apart — it’s a personal music, but it’s universal at the same time.”

Highlander brings together some of the finest musicians in Nashville and beyond, including country star and fellow West Virginian Kathy Mattea; fiddle virtuosos Michael Cleveland, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Darol Anger and Shad Cobb; renowned bluegrass vocalists Danny Paisley, Dudley Connell and Laurie Lewis; with dobro wizard Rob Ickes and banjo great Alison Brown also making guest appearances.

And though Raines emerged onto the national scene through the ancient tones of bluegrass music, it’s her unrelenting urge to wander down the rabbit hole and immerse herself into other sonic realms that has led to an abundance of lauded collaborations in the areas of Americana, country and folk.

Peeling back the layers of Highlander, Raines returns to her bluegrass roots. Coming into the recording process, Raines found herself, perhaps subconsciously, digging deep into the people, places and things residing at the foundation of her life and career.

Reflecting on the tracks selected for Highlander, Raines found the gem “Ghost of a Love,” a tune by Virginia-based Big Country Bluegrass.  Raines recalls, “Their version was a little different but I heard it with that classic bluegrass fast-waltz vibe that feels completely genuine to me.  It’s the perfect song to feature Dudley Connell, founding member of the traditional iconic band, The Johnson Mountain Boys." The number also features Raines’ husband, Ben Surratt, who engineered the album, and the inspiration for the ballad “Looking to You” — a Raines original paying tribute to the couple’s almost 40 years together.

“These songs represent both sides of me,” Raines says. “Even though they’re different grooves and different feels, I believe they each fall comfortably within the context of bluegrass — that’s how I see bluegrass, with a wide lens.”

Whether it was being a kid and heading to bluegrass festivals around the Mid-Atlantic with her family or seeing pillars of the genre onstage — Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Mac Wiseman, Sam Bush — each moment remains etched on the walls of Raines’ memory. And although Raines has ducked down numerous other avenues of sound and scope in recent years, she’s never left bluegrass behind.

“I love so many different kinds of music,” Raines says. “But, I cannot describe how bluegrass affects me, and why it affects me so deeply.”

If anything, Raines has always kept the intricate skillset and lifelong adoration for bluegrass in her back pocket amid her adventures into other musical circles. It’s like Monroe said long ago, “If you can play my music, you can play anything,” and so goes Missy Raines further and farther into her purposeful curiosity and bountiful discovery of self.

“I’m embracing bluegrass again, and it’s all been incredibly good for me,” Raines says. “In every sense of the way, I almost can just go back [in my mind] and rely on those intrinsic things I learned as a 15-year-old in a field at a bluegrass festival — tapping into how I felt back then, and how I still feel today about this music.”

With modern-day bluegrass currently experiencing another high-water mark as names like Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull proudly carry the torch of tradition and evolution, Raines finds solidarity in the ongoing growth and progress of the “high, lonesome sound” — this fine line between respect and rebellion that Raines has seamlessly balanced since the beginning.

“I watched that first generation of [bluegrass] people doing all that — creating traditional music, then breaking away from it to do their own thing,” Raines says. “And all of it is still surviving and flourishing. To me, there’s nothing more bluegrass than the act of absolute innovation — and that’s what we’re doing, because that’s what Monroe did from the start.”