Shelby Means
The Heartbeat of Golden Highway
There is no doubt that Molly Tuttle is extremely talented. This Grammy-winning artist has continually displayed the ability to write songs, sing and play lead and rhythm guitar with the best that bluegrass music has ever produced. But, typically, those who reach the mountain’s peak are blessed with others who support that ascent and Molly is no exception. Supporting her in the studio on her latest recording and out on the road is a stellar lineup of talented bandmates who comprise her band Golden Highway (Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Kyle Tuttle on banjo and Shelby Means on bass).
Each member of Golden Highway is not only technically among the best on their instruments, but the cohesiveness of their musicality, singing and stage presence provides the audience with something far greater than the sum of their individual parts. Beyond their tight and solid musical presentation, their personalities on stage blend flawlessly and their combined energies blast out in all directions. It is an energy that is palpable throughout the audience. After seeing Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway play in a small theater in Columbia, Missouri, my girlfriend said, “That is one of the best shows that I have ever seen in my life”—and she saw both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix play live.
The heartbeat of any band is the bass player. Although bass players seldom get the public recognition and attention they deserve, ask any great soloist or singer and they will tell you what a difference a great bass player can make in a band. Years ago, I produced an instructional video for bluegrass rhythm guitar with Wyatt Rice. Part of that video included Wyatt backing up his brother Tony, as he had done for decades on stage. After recording the first tune, Tony’s comment was “I feel naked up here without a bass.” I think that a lot of great soloists feel the same way.
The person who provides that heartbeat for Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway is Shelby Means. During a podcast interview, I asked Molly about the selection of her bandmates and she told me that every person that is in the band was her first call. So, of all of the bass players who she could have selected to be in her band, Shelby Means was her first call. That speaks volumes about Shelby’s abilities as a bass player, singer and performer.
Background
Shelby Means grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. Her dad is a hobby bluegrass musician who plays banjo and guitar. Her mom and dad hosted regular jam sessions at their home. Her brother, Jacob, plays the mandolin. Shelby’s first instrument, starting at the age of five, was the fiddle. After learning to play the fiddle and competing in the pee-wee division of the Wyoming State fiddle contest, she experienced some frustration because, she said, “I had really high expectations for myself on fiddle. I wanted to sound like Alison Krauss. But when that didn’t happen after about a half a year of playing, I decided to move on to something else.” She took a break from playing music after laying down the fiddle, but started up again in the fifth grade when she joined choir and learned to play the viola in the elementary school orchestra.
After fifth grade she didn’t want to play the viola in school and Shelby’s dad told her, “Before you learn any other instruments, learn the guitar. Even if you don’t stick with it you’ll be able to read the chords and play along at a jam.” Her dad taught her how to play the guitar (which she still plays today) and when she was fourteen, she started playing the bass. She said, “The approachability of the bass is what helped me stick with that instrument. I did have a few lessons from a great bass player, Erin Youngberg. She was a big mentor to me. I would stare at her and see how she was holding the bass and plucking the strings.” [Erin Youngberg (formerly Erin Coats) was a founding member, with her husband Aaron Youngberg, of the Hit and Run Bluegrass Band, who won the Rockygrass band contest in 2002 and the Telluride contest in 2003. Erin also has performed with the all-female old-time band Uncle Earl, Bearfoot, Two High String Band, and The Billy Pilgrims.]
In addition to learning from Erin Youngberg, Shelby attended festival workshops and said, “Eventually I got a Homespun video with Mark Schatz teaching bass and it was great for me. I learned the classical left hand positioning and he gave exercises for the right hand that were very helpful. His big things were tone, timing and taste.” Shelby also said that as a young person she was “obsessed” with Alison Krauss and Union Station and so Barry Bales was a huge influence on her bass playing. She said, “On the AKUS recordings it sounds like he kept it simple, playing the same note twice to change chords but then he would masterfully switch octaves to set a solo and verse apart or lay down an iconic run like on, ‘No Place To Hide.’ I like that approach to bass playing.”
Shelby’s first band experiences were with her father’s band, The Big Hollow Bluegrass Band. Shelby explained, “While my brother and I were working on our instruments, my dad’s band would let us play with them. Since there was already a bass player in that band, I played guitar and would sing songs and sing harmony.” At first Shelby and Jacob would get up on stage with the band for a few songs, but eventually—as their skills developed—they were included for the whole show. Shelby said, “Maybe if you talked to them they would say that we weren’t members of the band, but I felt like we were in the band!” (laughs)
While she was a senior in high school, Shelby and Jacob joined up with some other musicians from Colorado to form the band Long Road Home. The band competed in the Rockygrass band competition in 2005 and placed second. They returned the next year and won the contest. Shelby stayed with Long Road Home for two to three years. Formed in 2005, Long Road Home is still an active band featuring founders Martin Gilmore (guitar), and Justin Hoffenberg (fiddle) and now including Pete Wernick (banjo), Jordan Ramsey (mandolin), and Andrew Bonnis on bass.
After high school, Shelby went to college at the University of Wyoming, focusing on voice and choir, but also taking business classes. She said, “I was trying to make my own music business degree.” While at college, in 2009, Shelby put together a band that traveled to Slovakia and performed in an International Folk Music contest. Shelby explained, “The American liaison for the contest was my world music professor and he needed a folk band from the US to present at this contest. So, he asked me if I’d put a bluegrass band together.” Among others, Shelby recruited Courtney Hartman to be in that band. Courtney would later be Shelby’s bandmate in Della Mae.
In 2010, Shelby decided to make the move to Nashville and said, “Jamming with all of the amazing musicians there pushed me to get better.” When asked specifically what “getting better” meant to her at that point in her journey on the bass, Shelby said, “It was different things in different environments, but for instance, at a jam session people would call a swingy song in B-flat. I would go home and practice scales and walking in keys I wasn’t used to so that the next time someone called a song in that key I would know where the notes were! I also wanted to be able to play songs I’d never heard before. I would read the chords from the guitar player’s hand and try to learn it by the second time through. That was a big thing. Being the bass player, you are like the base of the pyramid of the music, so you are supporting the band. I would go to the bluegrass jam at the Five Spot and that is how I landed my first gig in Nashville. Funny enough it was a folk rock band with a drummer. That was a new experience for me. There was a learning curve as a bluegrass bassist playing upright bass with drums. It opened up my world.”
When asked what aspects of bass playing she feels help bring a player to the next level, Shelby said, “Basically, timing is what it boils down to for me. I achieved a deeper understanding of bass playing when I started to pay attention to the beginning and the end of each note and the space between notes. That placement can change the groove and is really important in bluegrass. Being surrounded by musicians in Nashville who were all excited to jam and wanted to get better made it an inspiring atmosphere to learn in. And, also, I think that all of the great musicians that I look up to have really big ears and level up by listening. If something feels strange in the groove department the bass player can try to find the anchor point and hold the band steady. That kind of navigation takes a lot of time and a group of musicians who are listening and communicating, often non-verbally, with each other.”
Shelby also emphasized that if you are a bass player in a bluegrass band it is important to have conversations with the other band members to make sure everyone is on the same page. She said, “The banjo player might say that they want to rip out slightly ahead of the beat on a solo and the mandolin, guitar, and bass players would say, ‘Ok we’ll look at each other and hold steady while that happens, it’ll be exciting.’” Although Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway have performed many shows together at this point and have developed somewhat of an intuition about what other band members are going to do on a given song, Shelby said that they still talk about rhythm and tempo.
Della Mae
In April of 2012, Shelby was invited to join the powerhouse all-female band Della Mae. When Shelby joined Della Mae the guitar player in the band was Courtney Hartman, who Shelby had met over the years at various Colorado and Wyoming bluegrass festivals. She said, “Our families grew up together and we reconnected at IBMA in Nashville and had a nice time chatting and playing music. A little while later Della Mae was looking for a bass player. I had heard about Kimber because my dad was into playing guitar back up for fiddlers at contests. I met the other gals on a Skype interview.”
Shelby stayed with Della Mae from 2012 through the end of 2014 and the band toured extensively during that time. Shelby said, “I stepped in at an amazing time for the band. They had just negotiated a record deal and Bryan Sutton was set to produce the Rounder Records debut. When that album was nominated for a GRAMMY, things really took off. We were playing over 150 shows per year, traveling to foreign countries with the State Department as cultural ambassadors and playing at all of the bluegrass festivals. Courtney and I were friends and it was nice to already know and respect one of the members of Della Mae when I first joined the band. They all became my sisters.”
When asked what she learned about being a bass player during her time with Della Mae, Shelby said, “I learned how to roll with the punches of borrowing or renting random basses until I got my own instrument to fly with. Then I figured out how to set up and tear down a Chadwick travel bass really fast! I learned how to use in-ear monitors and got to jam at festivals with some of the best bluegrass pickers around!” In addition to that, Shelby said that during her time with Della Mae she feels like she gained skills at several other aspects of being in a top touring band. One was playing the bass and singing harmony vocals at the same time. She said, “Compartmentalizing bass playing and singing harmony vocals—so that the bass rhythm and intonation is solid while you are singing—is a hard thing to do, but when I was with Della Mae, that clicked for me.” Additionally, she said that she learned how to lean into the rock and roll feeling that Celia Woodsmith brought to the band and she worked hard to form a solid rhythm section with mandolin player Jenni Lyn Gardner.
Another important event in Shelby’s life that occurred while she was touring with Della Mae, was meeting her husband Joel Timmons in 2012 at the Bristol Rhythm and Roots festival. Della Mae and Joel’s band, Sol Driven Train, were both performing. Two years later, in 2014, they started dating and by the end of that year, after a tour in Saudi Arabia, Shelby left Della Mae and started songwriting, performing and recording with Timmons as a Nashville based duo called Sally & George. A festival promoter in North Carolina also put Shelby and Joel together with another talented married couple, Billy Cardine and Mary Lucey, and the two couples formed the band Lover’s Leap.
Sally & George had a busy year planned for 2020, but then the pandemic hit and Shelby said, “All of that went away.” The couple was stranded in the U.S. Virgin Islands when the pandemic hit and they stayed there from March through May 2020. They then moved to Joel’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.
Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway
Shelby and Molly Tuttle met when Molly was a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and Shelby was with Della Mae. Shelby said, “Molly’s banjo player at the time, Wes Corbett, facilitated us meeting and, later, I ended up performing with Molly on two tours. After that, we were good friends. We lived close to each other in Nashville and we would do yoga or go for a bike ride and we’d have little jam sessions in the basement. We stayed friends and I feel super lucky to have been her first call.”
Since getting the call, in 2021, to be a member of Golden Highway, Shelby and the band have been very busy. They recorded a new album (City of Gold) and have been touring extensively, performing 99 shows in 2023. During that time Shelby has had the opportunity to meet, collaborate and spend time with many of the people she has idolized in the music industry.
After having the chance to hang out with and watch many talented bass players this past year (such as Dennis Crouch, Edgar Meyer, Paul Kowert, Sam Grisman and Jeff Picker) and other iconic musicians (Willie Nelson, Jerry Douglas and many others), Shelby’s advice to bass players is, “Love the metronome and surround yourself with musicians who inspire you.” Shelby is recording her debut bluegrass album this spring. An all-star cast of her bluegrass heroes and producer Maya DeVitry will contribute to the record.
Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway have been on fire during the past three years and the future is bright for this band. Shelby’s solid bass playing is the foundation that allows the soloists to soar and her singing—both harmony and a few lead vocals—is a significant added bonus. I predict we will continue to see and hear great things from this band, and from Shelby Means, in the future.
