Clay Hess is a Grammy award winner who first burst upon the national bluegrass music scene as the red-hot flat-picking guitarist with Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, with whom he toured for three years. With his awesome speed and tasty sense of syncopation, Hess has established himself as one of the top flat-pickers in the business.

Clay began playing guitar at age nine after hearing Tony Rice’s landmark recording, “Manzanita.” From there, Clay’s life was changed because all he did was play his old cheap “guitar. Before too long, Clay got his first “real” guitar when his dad bought him a new Martin D18 for his birthday. Clay continued to hone his skills and develop his own style, winning guitar contests along the way, including the Ohio State Guitar Championship in 1995. When he was 19, a friend told him about an open audition at Dollywood. Clay landed the gig, playing guitar with the band, True Blue. Fellow musicians were noticing Clay’s talents as a country and bluegrass guitarist. One of them was multi-Grammy Award winning country/bluegrass artist Ricky Skaggs.

httpvh://youtu.be/KVPovaypgEY Eventually Clay left Dollywood to return home to Ohio. He was working in construction and had nearly quit playing altogether when Ricky Skaggs called in 1999 and asked him to fill the guitar slot for Kentucky Thunder. Clay thought the call was a joke and hung up the phone. Ricky called a second time and convinced Clay that the offer was real. Clay was thrilled at the opportunity to play rhythm and lead guitar with these stellar musicians. Clay spent the next three years performing with Kentucky Thunder. While Clay was part of the band, the International Bluegrass Music Association awarded Kentucky Thunder their Instrumental Band of the Year Award for both 1999 and 2000. Clay recorded on three projects with Skaggs, and was awarded a Grammy for his participation on the project “Soldier of the Cross.”

After leaving Skaggs’ band, Clay toured with The Mark Newton Band playing mandolin and then guitar before joining Mountain Heart. Shortly, he left to join one of the hottest young bands around, Sierra Hull and Highway 111, before starting The Clay Hess Band.

Though Clay largely considers himself a bluegrass player, his influences range outside of bluegrass and include players such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Leon Rhodes.  My Favorite Guitars in conjunction with the custom shop at the CF Martin & Co. created two limited-run Clay Hess Signature models in 2005 and 2009.

For more info about Clay visit ClayHess.com

Early in his career Reece gained national prominence playing with Bob Wills then distinguished himself with remarkable talent and facility in many musical genres. He recorded and performed internationally with major artists on radio, television and motion pictures. Co-founder and president of MSA steel guitars, he is a legendary player known worldwide as a teacher, innovator, writer, recording artist, and is referenced as the “Master Of Chords.”

Ross Nickerson has recorded with some of the top names in bluegrass music. He was recently included on a compilation CD called Ultimate Banjo that included banjo legends Earl Scruggs and Sonny Osborne. Ross recently appeared on stage with The Riders in the Sky and The Oak Ridge Boys and has picked and appeared with many of the best banjo players in the world, including Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck and Ralph Stanley. Ross’s CD Blazing the West has won many awards, including being named by Country Music Television as one of the top ten CDs to pick up in 2003. Ross has just completed a new CD called Let’s Kick It that features hard driving traditional bluegrass banjo with Ross’s own personal touch. Accompanying Ross on the CD are members of the world renowned bluegrass band “Blue Highway”

Throughout his career Ross Nickerson has always enjoyed sharing his knowledge and helping others to learn to play the banjo. His many years of experience teaching privately and traveling the world to hold group workshops has helped him gain many unique insights into the common obstacles facing banjo students today. He has listened to his students, seen the challenges they face, understands what students are craving and always delivers his practical, focused instruction in a personable and easy-to-follow

manner. Ross Nickerson is the author of the top selling banjo book, The Banjo Encyclopedia “Bluegrass Banjo from A to Z” He has also written and recorded many other books, CDs and DVDs designed to help banjo students save time and learn the fun of playing 5-string banjo more easily. Ross is a full time musician and on the road ten to fifteen days a month performing concerts, teaching banjo workshops and reaching new audiences. He has been selected as a faculty member for many prestigious bluegrass and banjo camps and is the founder and coordinator of the Nova Scotia Banjo Camp and the annual BanjoTeacher.com Banjo Cruise. Find Ross at his website BanjoTeacher.com

Stetson Adkisson started his musical career in 2003. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, he has played many venues in the western United States and released a self-titled album in 2006. The honesty in his voice paired with his real-to-life writing style captivate audiences and have made him a fan favorite. As well as being a touring musician, Stetson is a professional hunting and fly fishing guide. In his time off the road, he can be found fly fishing and hunting often.

Stetson teaches songwriting in a fresh, understandable and fun way.

For more information about Stetson, visit: StetsonandCia.com

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Clay Powers has been playing guitar for 40 years and has played acoustic guitar, electric guitar, pedal steel guitar and bass in a variety of bands in almost every style.  His flat-picking guitar style is strongly influenced by musicians including Steve Kaufman, Brad Davis, Tim May, Kenny and Amanda Smith, Jim Hurst and Steve Smith.

During this three-day camp, Clay will focus on the fundamentals of flat-picking guitar.  He will cover topics including:

-Right hand technique
-Picking exercises
-Improving your tone
-The basic “language” of music / Chords 101
-Practice techniques
-Rhythm playing
-How to incorporate melody into your breaks
-Playing in different positions up the neck
-How to pick out tunes
-Creating your own solos

Currently, Clay and his wife Sheila own and operate Charley’s Guitar Shop in Dallas, Texas.  Prior to Charley’s, Clay spent over 20 years with Dallas-based Showco and Vari-Lite.  With Showco he designed sound systems for a “Who’s Who” of international touring artists and holds two U.S. patents for digital mixing console designs.  Ultimately, Clay became president of Vari-Lite International, a public company with offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia, which grew out of Showco’s innovation of the first computer controlled automated stage lighting system.  In 2002, Clay and Sheila decided to rededicate themselves to something they have always enjoyed:  playing music and buying, selling and trading great instruments.  Charley’s has been dealing in fine and vintage stringed instruments since 1976.

For more information about Clay, visit: CharleysGuitar.com.

It is a warm spring evening in Nashville. Inside the world famous Station Inn a crowd that was waiting in line even before the club’s doors opened at 7 p.m. is anxiously awaiting an evening with the Nashville Bluegrass Band (NBB). The small listening room is packed with NBB faithful. Returning from Los Angeles, where their latest album, Unleashed, won the Grammy for album of the year only a week earlier, the band’s members are in high spirits, mixing with the members of the crowd, laughing, joking and telling stories. Then, shortly after nine, the band opens its high energy set. Halfway through it, Roland White steps up to the microphone for his first vocal solo, Bill Monroe’s “Toy Heart.” For White, who turns in his usual solid performance, this evening is the latest triumph in a journey that began many years before and many miles away.

In fact, he still remembers clearly how it began. Barely eight, Roland, the eldest of the White children was helping his mother in the kitchen as they listened to a country radio station. As one song faded into the next, White asked her one question after another about the singers he heard. As they spoke, he told her that he, too, hoped to sing on the radio one day. Practice, she told her son, and you might be able to earn your living just like the folks on the radio.

The moment was a revelation for young Roland. “When I heard that I thought, ‘Man, that’s what I want to do.’ And, it seemed like the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it.” For a boy with these intentions, there may not have been a better place to be than the White household in those days. Growing up in the rural state of Maine with few outside distractions, White was surrounded by his father’s siblings, 16 in all, many of whom were musicians. There were always instruments around and plenty of people to play them. And almost every week, somebody was buying a new 78 rpm record to add to the Whites’ diverse collection.

Often, White’s father and uncles met there to sing and play. At first, White and his sister, Joanne, would join in the singing. But before long, White had a guitar in his hands and was trying to mimic the sounds his dad made on the instrument.

Focused on his dream, White organized “band” rehearsals each night with his own younger brothers, Eric and Clarence. Though the younger White boys were initially more interested in playing outdoors, White, with the backing of his parents, persisted until the practices became a regular part of each day.

White says his father always supported his musical ambitions. “If he was doing something around the house I would hang out with him and ask to help. He’d say, ‘well, I’d rather you be working on your instrument.'”

Though he started on the flattop, it wasn’t long before the future Blue Grass Boy had a $2.50 “tater bug” mandolin in his hands. He still remembers how comfortable it was to play the smaller instrument initially while Eric played tenor banjo and Clarence the guitar, and Joanne sang and sometimes played bass. To start, says White, the three of them would play old time country songs they learned from their father and uncles. “We just played what we knew,” he says.

Throughout the early 1950s, the White children were learning all the songs they could as fast as they were able. About once a month the boys would play in local Grange Halls, and they performed at family gatherings and for household guests. By the time their father moved the family to Burbank, California, for a new job, the children were ready to take their careers to the next level.

Only a month after arriving in California, the White children entered and won a talent contest on a local radio station. Then, the boys auditioned at an area television station for a new show that was looking for “kid” acts. They were hired on the spot as the “Country Boys,” this time without Joanne, who decided not to continue.

California also opened other new worlds for White and his siblings. It was there that he received his first exposure to Big Mon. Playing a $25 F-style Kalamazoo brand instrument by this time, White says one of his uncles told him about a mandolin player on the Grand Ole Opry named Bill Monroe who was “pretty good, pretty quick.” That led him to a local music store where he ordered, at random, a 45 rpm version of Monroe’s “Pike County Breakdown.”

White was a little frustrated upon first hearing Monroe. “I thought, ‘This is neat, but this is really fast.’ We never played it like that back then. But it was interesting to try and break it down, which was almost impossible at first.”

Not long after he received the record, White saw Monroe for the first time on television. “It was Christmas Eve of 1956 on a show called Town Hall Party, I was watching him and I had my mandolin in hand. In fact, that’s how I learned to do mandolin chords. It was a real eye opener to see how was holding his hands,” says White. Around this time the brothers first met banjo player Billy Ray Latham who, with Roland and Clarence, would ultimately form the nucleus of the Kentucky Colonels. “When we met him, we invited him over to the house and that was it, there was our bluegrass band.”

Over the next few years the band played constantly and made regular appearances at a Hollywood folk music club known as the Ash Grove. Then, in 1960, Roger Bush took over the bass duties from Eric and the Colonels lineup was complete. The band was then joined by Leroy McNees on Dobro, while Bobby Slone and Scott Stoneman would sometimes add their fiddling to the mix.

In 1963, after Roland returned from a two-year stint in the Army, the Colonels toured the eastern half of the country, playing clubs and coffeehouses. The next year they returned to the East and made a well-received appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July, where an extremely-nervous Clarence was invited to a guitar workshop hosted by Doc Watson. “It was probably the biggest crowd we had ever seen,” says White. In that same year the band recorded its critically acclaimed album, Appalachian Swing, recently reissued on Rounder Records. Ironically for an album that has become a centerpiece in many bluegrass instrumentalists’ collections, White says Appalachian Swing was recorded without vocals as a way to cut costs.

As the folk boom died down in the mid-’60s, the Colonels found it harder to get bluegrass gigs. And, by 1966, Clarence, who had begun playing more electric guitar, left to do studio work, which eventually led to his joining the Byrds. Roland, meanwhile, had taken up electric bass and was playing country music in Southern California’s lounges to help make ends meet. In 1967, White made his way back to bluegrass when Bill Monroe was touring California. Lamar Grier, then Monroe’s banjo player, told White the Blue Grass Boys needed a guitar player to replace Doug Green, who was returning to college. “I knew I could do what he needed, so I asked him for the job and he hired me,” says White. The job with Monroe lasted for the better part of two years until White signed on as mandolin player with Lester Flatt’s newly formed Nashville Grass. He stayed with Flatt four years until deciding to reunite with brother Clarence in 1973. Billed the New Kentucky Colonels, the brothers performed on the East and West coasts, made a tour of Europe, then went to California to prepare to record an album. But just as the venture began it was over. In July of 1973, as Roland and Clarence were loading their equipment into the car after a gig, the pair was struck by a car. Clarence was killed and Roland sustained minor injuries. There were many things the pair had intended to do, says White. “Clarence wanted to try lots of different things; some electric, some acoustic,” says White.

After the accident, White returned home to Nashville to regroup when he got a call from Roger Bush and Alan Munde, who had formed the successful Country Gazette.

“They needed a guitar player and asked if I was interested. Well, that was just the thing I needed. I had been really looking forward to working with Clarence again, we had plans and then I had nothing. So, I took the job,” he says.

White fondly remembers the 13 years he spent as the Gazette’s guitar player then mandolinist. “The fun part was working with the people who were in the band…Alan, Roger, Byron Berline, Kenny Wirtz, Joe Carr. They were great. Creativity [in this band] was happening with new arrangements, new songs, new venues.”

Since 1989, White has had his current gig as the mandolin player for the NBB, referred to by some as the “state-of-the-art” bluegrass band. “Though we are bluegrass, I sometimes think of us as an acoustic country band. We’ve played all kinds of songs that didn’t come to us as bluegrass songs at all. If anyone tells me: ‘I’ve got a bluegrass song for you,’ I don’t even want to hear it, because it probably won’t be any good. The bluegrass songs have been written…by Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and others. Those songs have been done, they’re like the old jazz standards, and they’re great and I still like to listen to them.”

While he still listens to the old Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs albums, White confesses a real love of jazz and says he is just as apt to have the recordings of Herb Ellis, the Modern Jazz Quartet or Freddie Green in his compact disc player. Someday, he hopes to learn it well enough to perform and record it.

Over the years, all of these influences and experiences have helped White to develop a unique style. His playing is simple, uncluttered and relaxed with a clock-like sense of timing. And, White feels that playing has found a real home with the NBB. “I don’t know who else I would want to work with. I played with these guys around town a long time before they formed the band and when they did I thought, ‘This is the coolest thing since Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs played together.'”

White offers nothing but praise for each of his fellow bandmates. On fiddler Stuart Duncan: “Every time we play he will do something that will make me just want to drop my pick. He’s just so remarkable.” On guitarist and vocalist Pat Enright: “He’s a great rhythm guitar player. He’s just wonderful, he never does anything that doesn’t work. It’s straightforward and simple and no one knows how to do it except for Pat. It’s hard to do.”

“Gene Libbea,” says White, “is the kind of bass player that nobody has in bluegrass. He has played all kinds of music. I really like what he does; he’s an eye opener and other people need to listen to what he’s doing. And Alan O’Bryant is a hellacious banjo picker and singer. I don’t know why he doesn’t get any awards for his work, he sings the heck out of anything he does.”

With a lineup that appears secure into the foreseeable future, and the second Grammy award under their belts, Roland and his colleagues hope to continue to spread the bluegrass gospel far and wide. The key to gaining widespread acceptance of the music, says White, is television. Just as television brought him his first glimpse of Monroe, White believes it has the potential to create millions of new fans. “Everybody’s got a tv. If there was one good bluegrass concert on a week, you’d see lots more people buying the music. That’s what happened with country music.”

Country singer Marty Stuart, who has known White since the days when the two played in Lester Flatt’s band, recently wrote this of his friend: “For those of us who love bluegrass music, it’s always been the same. It’s understood that Bill Monroe is the Father of it all…but time has a way of crawling along and taking the responsibility for the future to other souls. As long as I know that Roland has a voice in the inner circle, I know that everything’s going to be all right concerning the tradition and future of bluegrass.”

For more information about Roland, visit: RolandWhite.com

Born in the small town of Davisville, WV, Amanda Smith grew up singing in church choirs and participating in talent contests at local fairs. “I always sang, my mom and dad said, even before I can remember, “she says today. She started playing guitar in high school to accompany herself, and soon discovered bluegrass music through female artists such as Claire Lynch, Rhonda Vincent and Alison Krauss. She met her future husband at a Lonesome River Band concert, and the couple began dating and playing music together almost immediately. “I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but there was definitely something there,” she explains. Their shared Christian faith, love for bluegrass and desire to perform together led them to record a debut CD.

For more information about Amanda, visit: http//Kenny-AmandaSmith.com