Molly Tuttle is Best Bluegrass Guitarist. It’s Also Much More.


Singer, songwriter and guitarist Molly Tuttleher fingers move so fast that she can pocket her without breaking her stride. Despite only releasing albums for three years, the keenest ears in Americana music have been noticed.

“I’ve never heard Molly Tuttle hit a single note that wasn’t completely confident,” said David Rawlings, the established music guitar master. Half of Gillian Welch’s duo. “Molly plays with a confidence and command that only the best guitarists can achieve. If this could be bottled, I would buy two.”

Best known as a bluegrass guitarist, 29-year-old Tuttle emerges remarkably as resistant to tags. First woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitarist of the Year award (two years in a row, 2017, and 2018), considers herself as much a singer as she is a slightly soprano-astonishing freak-out actress. Nor exactly a bluegrass musician.

“I think of bluegrass as part of what I do,” Tuttle said as he settled into a chair in his Manhattan ad agency’s office. “I can open up my Bluegrass self, but it doesn’t feel like my self-identity, it feels more like an outlet for something I do and have been doing since I was a kid.”

Tuttle began to define his own root pop brand with two critically acclaimed albums, “When You’re Ready” from 2019 and its 2020 sequel “…But I’d Interest Be With You.” The second LP was all covers, while Tuttle co-wrote every single song on Friday’s upcoming album “Crooked Tree.” is is too much bluegrass. Since many of her songs are written not only from a female perspective, but also from a feminist perspective, Tuttle is against the genre, which remains a male-dominated genre.

“I’ve always felt a block when writing bluegrass songs,” she said. “I’m just not into most of the old themes. But something clicked where I could write songs that made me feel who I am but still fit bluegrass.”

Tuttle grew up in a musical family in Palo Alto, California. His father made a living teaching guitar and counted his daughter and two younger brothers as valuable students. Turning to guitar at age 8, Tuttle soon entered a strict regimen (for a 10-year-old): one hour after school, one hour before bed.

A musical omnivore, Tuttle has assisted in rock, punk, and rap, including National, Neko Case, and Bay Area punk bands Operation Ivy and Rancid. (Don’t miss the irresistibly repulsive punkgrass cover of Rancid’s “Olympia WA,” his solo is a 16th-note machine-gun spray.) Tuttle played acoustic guitar and banjo in the family’s bluegrass band, but he linked up with turntable rock bands. The middle school music teacher had a large CD collection, many of which ended up on Tuttle’s iPod.

“I remember taking the Rage Against the Machine album home,” he said, “and ‘Whoa! This is great!'”

Tuttle, at the age of ten, was going to California bluegrass festivals with his father, enjoying company. “It was so cool,” he said, “because no one at my school knew what bluegrass was.”

The scholarship has only lasted so long. At a festival, Tuttle took part in an impromptu jam where the only musician he didn’t know was the man playing the tunes. When it was his turn to solo, “He leaned right in front of me and pointed to the guy next to me like, ‘You’re alone. He completely bypassed me.’”

The sting of sexism empowered him: “I have my own band today, so there’s no one but me to make me feel like that guy did,” she said. “But there is always,” she added, “when you’re the only woman, so they sing in a male key and you can’t sing. Stuff like that happens a lot.”

Tuttle has spent his life overcoming another hurdle: alopecia areata, an incurable autoimmune disease that he contracted when he was 3 years old and causes partial or total body hair loss, as in Tuttle’s case.

“People thought I had cancer, which really made me conscious,” Tuttle said. “First my parents bought me a hat” – make it a youtube videopeeking out from under a sort of oversized cloche. She wore a wig at age 15 and “finally felt like ‘I can relax’.”

Those not affected by alopecia rarely realize their weight, Tuttle said. “People without alopecia think, ‘Well, it’s just hair,’ or ‘You can wear a wig,'” she said. “It’s a traumatic event. It’s like losing a part of your body.” While Tuttle says it is comfortable not to wear a wig today, she prefers to wear a wig on stage. “The thing that felt right to me was embracing the fluidity of ‘I can wear a wig one day, I won’t wear a wig the next,'” she said.

Learning to live with the disease is what Tuttle told the world, “I’d rather be a crooked tree!” continues to be a challenge that inspired the title song of his new album, which he called Writing and performing “Crooked Tree” – which makes him proud as the album’s title – is, for Tuttle, an act of self-acceptance and affirmation.

“Growing up with this and being comfortable talking about it has helped me overcome a lot of social anxiety – I’m naturally shy; Everyone in my family does,” she said, and laughed. “It helped me understand that it doesn’t matter what other people think, you can be yourself.”

After majoring in guitar performance at Boston’s Berklee College of Music—guitarists Clarence White and David Grier, and Joni Mitchell, although she says her original teaching was to listen closely to singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens (“He stood up for the marginalized”) for years. – Tuttle has arrived in Nashville.

He worked with popular pop producers Ryan Hewitt on his first album and Tony Berg on his second album. Both surrounded Tuttle’s voice and guitar with very textured, sometimes overly loud soundscapes.

In February 2021, Tuttle was writing songs for what would become his third pop album, when bluegrass songs that had returned to his comfort zone in times of anxiety began pouring out of his mouth. Putting the pop project on the shelf for now, he invited some of Nashville’s best bluegrass players to the studio and asked dobro master Jerry Douglas, a major force in contemporary bluegrass, to produce what became the “Crooked Tree” with him.

The first single of the album, “She Will Change” Co-written with Ketch Secor of Tuttle’s frequent collaborator, The Old Crow Medicine Show, is a hymn to strong women interspersed with Tuttle’s astonishing bluegrass runs (“She just snaps her little fingers/And they all line up”).

In other pieces, Tuttle isn’t afraid to tear down old themes. “I’ve always loved murder ballads,” he said, “and I have a natural love for horror movies, gore, and spooky stories. But some old ballads are really misogynistic. There’s a lot of violence against women. So I changed the perspective to a woman’s.” In “The River Knows,” co-written with Melody Walker, this is the man who was hacked to death as a change (“Washed proof runs through my hair/Crimson is so fair”).

“I’ll always want to go back to bluegrass,” said Tuttle, though he’s playing with musical tradition on the new album. “It has already become a very loose term. Today everybody listens to everything and confuses everything.”

Today’s genre is indeed quite different from that of its founder, Bill Monroe. “Had Bill come to a bluegrass festival today,” said Mark O’Connor, another lifelong cross-border violinist and composer who converted to violinism, “he would barely recognize the genre he helped create.

“Having that said,” O’Connor added, “If Bill Monroe were here today, he’d hire Molly Tuttle for his Blue Grass Boys. Because he can sing a loud solo and keep that beat on straight guitar. But then Bill, the band would have to consider a name change for it.”

Tuttle, of Manhattan, considered the options: “Blue Grass Persons?” suggested.



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