Tommy Emmanuel

Two-time GRAMMY nominee Tommy Emmanuel CGP is one of the world’s most respected musicians. With a professional career spanning five decades, Tommy has garnered hundreds of thousands of loyal fans worldwide.

His unusual talent and life are common lore in Australia: born into a musical family, Tommy got his first guitar at age 4 and was taught by his mother. He quickly learned by ear, with no formal instruction, and has never read music. By age 6 he was working as a professional musician in the family band (variously named The Emmanuel Quartet, The Midget Surfaries and The Trailblazers). By the age of 10, young Tommy had already played his way across Australia.

In the 1970s, Tommy was in high demand as a session player and sideman: he played on recordings for Air Supply, Men at Work and dozens of other popular bands and artists, as well as thousands of commercial jingles and tunes. Some of his most notable appearances were on the Air Supply hit singles “Lost in Love,” “All Out of Love,” “Every Woman in the World,” and “Now and Forever.” Tommy soon became known as one of the best modern guitarists in Australia. In 1985 he joined one of the decade’s biggest Australian rock bands, Dragon, and recorded the platinum-selling album Dreams of Ordinary Men. It is for his successful solo career, however, that Tommy is best known.

In the 1980s, Tommy finally met and got to play with his hero, Chet Atkins, in Nashville, TN. From that magical moment forward, Atkins took him under his wing, and the influences are evident throughout Tommy’s music: in his personal philosophy, technical precision, virtuosic improvisations and unusually broad repertoire (encompassing not only country and bluegrass, but pop, jazz, blues, gospel, even classical, flamenco, and aboriginal styles). Tommy speaks of his mentor with the love and gratitude of a son, and his dream of recording with Chet Atkins came true in 1996 when the pair made an album titled “The Day The Finger Pickers Took Over The World” for which Tommy received his first GRAMMY award nomination.

Chet honored Tommy with the title of “Certified Guitar Player” (CGP) for his contribution to guitar music, a very rare distinction shared by only four other people in the world. After an amazing performance with his brother Phil at the Sydney Olympic Games Closing Ceremony, the world wanted to know who this mysterious Australian guitar virtuoso was. In 2001, Tommy released his first solo-acoustic album, ONLY and his popularity has grown by leaps and bounds aided by a non-stop touring schedule and increasing exposure in the media.

His album The Mystery earned him another GRAMMY nomination, and in 2008 Guitar Player Magazine and Acoustic Guitar Magazine named him Best Acoustic Guitarist and Gold Medalist in the in the Readers’ Choice and Players’ Choice Awards. Guitar Player’s 2010 Readers Choice awards named him Best Acoustic Guitarist for the second time.

Tommy Emmanuel is an honorary Kentucky Colonel, a CGP (Certified Guitar Player), an Order of Australia Medalist (AM) and the holder of both an honorary Masters Degree (MA) and more recently an honorary Doctor of Arts (DR) from Charles Sturt University in Australia in recognition of his commitment to rural Australia and his contribution to music education.

Molly Tuttle

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway—her brand new band of bluegrass virtuosos featuring mandolinist Dominick Leslie, banjoist Kyle Tuttle, fiddle player Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and bassist Shelby Means—will tour the United States in 2022 in support of Tuttle’s forthcoming Nonesuch Records debut.

An award-winning guitarist and songwriter, native Californian Molly Tuttle continues to push her songwriting in new directions and transcend musical boundaries. Since moving to Nashville in 2015, she has worked with many of her peers and heroes in the Americana, folk, and bluegrass communities, winning Instrumentalist of the Year at the 2018 Americana Music Awards. Tuttle’s 2019 debut album, When You’re Ready, received critical acclaim, with NPR Music praising its “handsomely crafted melodies that gently insinuate themselves into the memory,” and the Wall Street Journal lauding Tuttle’s “genre-boundary-crossing comfort and emotional preparedness,” calling the record an “invigorating, mature and attention-grabbing first album.”

Tuttle’s accolades also include Folk Alliance International’s honor for Song of the Year for “You Didn’t Call My Name,” from her 2017 Rise EP, and consecutive trophies for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year; she was the first woman in the history of the IBMA to win that honor.

During the pandemic, Tuttle recorded a covers album, …but i’d rather be with you, which was released in August 2020. The record, which features guest vocals from Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, includes songs by musicians ranging from FKA Twigs to Cat Stevens, Rancid to Karen Dalton, and The National to The Rolling Stones. The New Yorker’s Jay Ruttenberg, in praising her rendition of the Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” says: “In Tuttle’s reading, the song uses a bluegrass spirit to look to the past—and a feminist allegiance to peek at the future.”

Larry Campbell

Larry Campbell is so accomplished as a musician that it is nearly impossible to include just his career highlights on one page. Larry is a three-time Grammy Award-winning producer for his work with the late, beloved drummer for The Band, Levon Helm. As the musical director of the Levon’s band, Larry was a key part of the group’s national tours, festivals, television appearances and Midnight Rambles at Levon Helm Studios.

Larry famously worked alongside Bob Dylan from 1997 to 2004, lending his unmistakable touch on guitar, fiddle, mandolin, pedal steel, cittern and vocals to Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour and recordings such as Love & Theft. Throw in productions, recordings and concerts with a who’s
who of luminaries like Keith Richards, Mavis Staples, Marie Knight, Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, Sheryl Crow, Garland Jefferies, Buddy & Julie Miller, Emmylou Harris, Phil Lesh, Shawn Colvin, kd lang and others, and you get an idea of Larry’s accomplishments. Larry’s movie & TV music output includes selections in the films Brokeback Mountain and Taking Woodstock and TV shows like the 13-part PBS children’s special Lomax: The Hound of Music.

In 2008 Larry received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his instrumental work from the Americana Music Association. Larry tours and records with his wife, Teresa Williams. They have released two albums of their own music through Red House/Compass Records plus the ten-part documentary series It Was the Music on Amazon.

Stuie French

Stuie French grew up in Tasmania, Australia. He felt drawn to the guitar and his father and big brother’s old Johnny Cash records. “The guitar was so prominent and dominant on those records that I just wanted to learn it,” Stuie says. “We had an old acoustic guitar. Then in the mid-70s, my brother went and bought me an electric. He was an apprentice mechanic and didn’t have much money, but he bought me a guitar.”

Stuie became a monster player with chops that sublimely meld the virtuosity and instinct of jazz with the clear tone and restraint of American hillbilly roots music. Stuie’s prodigious skill led to high-profile sideman gigs with Australia’s top touring artists, as well as recognition from his own heroes including Tommy Emmanuel, who asked Stuie to serve as a tutor at the Tommy Emmanuel Guitar Camp Australia, and Les Paul, who invited Stuie on stage to play with him in New York. Stuie also toured and jammed with his idol Merle Haggard on the latter’s Australian tour as a member of the opening band.

Having won three Golden Guitar Awards in Australia it felt like a natural progression for Stuie and his family to pack up and moved to Nashville in 2019 to go the next step in their musical journey.

Parker Hastings

Parker Hastings is a 22 year-old fingerstyle guitarist/singer/songwriter from Central Kentucky where there is a deep heritage of country, folk, and bluegrass music. He began learning the guitar at age 6, playing the music he enjoyed listening to on the radio. His whole mindset of playing guitar changed when he went to his first Tommy Emmanuel concert when he was just 8 years old. He is very active in promoting thumbpicking and fingerstyle guitar, incorporating the traditional sounds into his music. Parker is continuing to grow as a musician, singer, and songwriter, making a “thumbprint” with his original music. He has had many opportunities to share his music with audiences in a venues around the country, opened for other artists such as Tommy Emmanuel, Jerry Douglas, Ben Rector, Loren Barrigar & Mark Mazengarb, and more. He has also collaborated with some of the best musicians in Nashville at shows like the Jerry Reed Tribute and Chet Atkins Appreciation Society Convention. His style ranges anywhere from Glenn Miller to James Taylor, Chet Atkins to Earth Wind & Fire, his own original music, and much more! He enjoys bringing a fresh sound to old classics, making them new again. He has won numerous guitar contests, one of them being the International Home of the Legends Thumbpicking Competition, as well as the Wayne Henderson Festival Competition in June of 2018. He is an alumni of Belmont University in Nashville, TN, calling Nashville his home base. Parker is currently working on his third studio album, set to be released in early 2023

John Knowles CGP

John Knowles has worked with the world’s finest fingerstyle and classical guitarists including Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Lenny Breau, Tommy Emmanuel and the Romero Family. John’s Gorilla Song (co-written with his son Jay) is an international hit with recordings by Raffi and XUXA.

John is a highly regarded teacher, known for his publications and workshops including a recent Artist Residency at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Thousands of guitarists around the world are learning from his publications including his FingerStyle Quarterly.

John’s work has won a Grammy and two Emmy nominations. In 1996, Chet Atkins awarded John the first Honorary CGP (Certified Guitar Player) degree and in 2004, John was inducted into the National Thumb Picker’s Hall of Fame for the second time. John earned his PhD in physics from Texas Christian University in 1968.

“When I lead a workshop, I bring a tune or two we can all learn, but I especially enjoy hearing what other players are working on… their arrangements or compositions. As we work together, I look for ways to share what I’ve learned… and how I work. We have so much to learn from each other.

Richard Smith

Richard started playing the guitar at age 5 and has never looked back. Focusing early on with the fingerstyle guitar of Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed, he began transcribing classical music, Jazz, the gypsy style of Django Reinhardt, bluegrass, ragtime and the blues to Sousa marches. Now a seasoned performer in his forties with thousands of performances worldwide to his credit, Richard has become renowned worldwide for his mastery of instrument and for his knock-out entertaining shows.

Christie Lenée

Christie Lenee’ is a talented lady with a lot of stage presence and energy that excites all who see and hear her. She has many new adventurous techniques and styles that make me shake my head in wonder!

Gareth Pearson

Gareth Pearson is referred to as “The Welsh Tornado” which is particularly appropriate, seeing as this special talent combines fingerstyle pyrotechnics, with explosive lead runs making Pearson one of the most exciting acoustic musicians gigging today.

Gareth has a distinctive style that can be heard through his creative and innovative arrangements which cover a wide spectrum of genres, including country/folk/classical/pop/rock/jazz/swing and bluegrass music, along with his own beautiful and often intricate original compositions.

Drawing his playing style initially from influences such as Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Jerry Reed and Tommy Emmanuel, he has developed a style that is both inspiring and entertaining.

Within a year of taking up the guitar, Gareth was opening for Tommy Emmanuel on his 2005 UK tour. It was in Cardiff where Tommy invited Gareth to play at the CAAS convention (Chet Atkins Appreciation Society) in Nashville Tennessee.

Later that year, Gareth was performing and touring alongside Ray Davies (The Kinks), John Renbourne, and Southside Johnny and the Ashbury Jukes. During the Southside Johnny tour, Gareth was invited by Southside to be flown over to the USA to open for his annual New Years Eve concert at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey.

The following year Gareth was invited by Tommy Emmanuel to be the support act for his UK tour, following extensive UK supports to Jan Akkerman, Andy McKee and appearing at numerous Folk Festivals and Guitar workshops including the Montreal Jazz Festival.

With appearances throughout Europe and a growing reputation, Gareth was invited to perform at the 2008 Canadian Guitar Festival where he came to the attention of Candyrat Records. This lay the seed for Gareth to be the first UK guitarist to be signed by the label. On its release, Gareth’s debut album “Urban Echoes Vol 1” was selected by Acoustic Guitar editors and frequent contributors as one of the “Essential Acoustic Albums of 2010”.

With Appearances at the 2009 Montreal Guitar Festival, USA and Worldwide tours and Guitar workshops, Gareth’s reputation as a performer and teacher is constantly growing.

Teresa Williams

Multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter Larry Campbell and singer-guitarist Teresa Williams’ acclaimed eponymous 2015 debut, released after seven years of playing in Levon Helm’s band – and frequent guesting with Phil Lesh, Little Feat, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, brought to the stage the crackling creative energy of a decades-long offstage union.

A whirlwind of touring and promo followed, and when the dust cleared, the duo was ready to do it all again. Which brings us to Contraband Love, a riskier slice of Americana.

Larry, who produced Contraband Love, says, “I wanted this record to be a progression, bigger than the first one. That’s all I knew. I wanted the songwriting to be deeper, the arrangements more interesting, the performances more dynamic. Specifically how to get there, I didn’t know. I did know the songs were different. The subject matter was darker than anything else I’ve written.”

“More painful!” Teresa says, and laughs.

“Yeah,” Larry says with a smile. “I’m proud of our debut, but I felt like the songs were lighter than what I’m capable of doing. As a songwriter, I aspire to a sense of uniqueness: this is a great song and it could only have been written by me. I want to get there. It’s a journey, a goal, a pursuit. The mechanics of that pursuit are figuring out what you need to do to surpass your last body of work.”

Although it was not his conscious intent, three of the eight tunes Campbell penned for Contraband Love deal either obliquely or directly with various emotions surrounding addiction. For the blues rocking “Three Days in A Row,” he authoritatively delves into the crucial first seventy-two hours directly following an addict going cold turkey in an effort to get clean. “I was thinking about the things I’ve quit in my life,” he says. “The last time was cigarettes. I remembered the dreams I had in withdrawal.” Vintage-sounding country nugget “Save Me from Myself” (featuring Little Feat’s Bill Payne on piano) explores a troubled soul’s heartrending knowledge that they are hard to love. “I’ve certainly felt both sides of that situation,” Larry says, “and observed it many times.” Delicate waltz “Contraband Love,” a captivating vocal showcase for Teresa, takes on the other side of the story, when a parent (or spouse, or friend, etc.) realizes their only recourse for dealing with an addict is merely to stand “with arms wide open.” Of this remarkable piece, Larry says, “That melody would not leave me alone. It’s one of the more unique songs I’ve ever written.”

“Larry’s writing this stuff,” Teresa says, “and we’re naming off all the people in our lives who are currently going through this (addiction and loss) with a loved one, not to mention the family members and friends we’ve lost in the past from this affliction. That may have driven him. One of my oldest, most intimate friends – a functioning substance abuser since he was a teenager – died on the street in New York while we were in the studio. We dedicated the album to him.”

“The stuff of loss resonates,” Larry says.

Musically, Contraband Love revisits the Americana textures of the duo’s debut, deftly channeling Memphis, Chicago, the Delta, and Appalachia with equal assurance. Larry’s world-famous guitar work – scorching here, funky there, stellar always – punctuates the proceedings with riveting emotion, often like a third voice weighing in on a myriad of emotional states.

The barnburner leadoff single, “Hit and Run Driver,” is a harrowing-but-rocking survivor’s tale, showcasing longtime drummer and engineer/mixer Justin Guip.

To leaven out the darker tunes, Larry and Teresa added a recording of the reassuring Carl Perkins country classic “Turn Around,” with old friend and mentor Levon Helm, captured on drums shortly before his passing. Jaunty folk blues “My Sweetie Went Away,” features new bass player Jesse Murphy doubling on tuba for a distinctly New Orleans feel; traditional gutbucket country blues “Delta Slide,” is spiced with irresistible, harmonized yodeling.

“Stylistically, there’s a lot of different things going on,” Larry says. “So the sequencing was difficult. But I think I got it right.”

Indeed. Contraband Love stands as a new, bolder chapter in a story that arose triumphantly joyous from loss. “When Levon died,” Teresa says, “that put Larry into high gear. He’d already had his head set about making a record, but then it felt like a train took off! We just said, ‘life is short.’”

Another motivator for creating Contraband Love was the experience of taking the Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams show out on the road, as a duo, with a band, and opening for Jackson Browne (who loaned them his band). “It felt fabulous and fantastic,” Larry says. “After I met Teresa (in the mid 80s), I’d be out with Bob Dylan [Larry toured with the Nobel laureate for eight years] and something was missing. I gotta gig, and it’s what I always wanted, but it’s not my stuff, and it’s not with the person I want to be with. And then, when we got a taste of being a performing duo at the Rambles with Levon, the idea that we could expand on that was completely alluring.

“So virtually everything we’ve done musically since I left Dylan’s band, we’ve been asked to do together: Levon, Phil and Friends, Jorma and Jack, Little Feat; we’ve done it all as a unit, a duo, and it’s great. It’s rewarding on a lot of levels. The way I see it, when Teresa and I are together, doing our material for people who come to see us, then everything I ever wanted out of life is pretty well complete.”