Red Camel Collective

Photos by Angie Reed

If one word can describe Red Camel Collective, it’s momentum. It’s no coincidence that Heather Berry Mabe, the lead singer and guitarist for the band, won the 2024 IBMA Momentum Award for Vocalist of the Year. She is also nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America (SPBGMA), joined by her husband Tony Mabe, nominated for Banjo Performer of the year. Riding on that momentum, the band is releasing their self-titled debut album with Pinecastle Records in February.

While the four-member band has been together as Red Camel Collective only since summer of 2023, they have played together with the Junior Sisk Band for several years and continue to do so. They even chose their band name in homage to one of Sisk’s hits, “The Man in Red Camels.” 

Explaining how they planned to balance their time between the two bands, mandolin player Johnathan Dillon said that since the band is still in its infancy, they haven’t had to deal with scheduling conflicts. He added, “So far, we have mainly tried to book during Junior’s off season. He stays busy, spring, summer, and early fall, then he usually takes off late in the fall for deer season and such. Right now, we’ve been trying to schedule dates in the late fall to wintertime, and trying to work as many dates as we can with both bands at the same venue.”

Heather said, “Whenever we play with Junior on stage, he always gives us a portion—at least a couple of songs.”  Johnathan added, “I think this was partly Junior’s idea. We would be on the bus playing, jamming some tunes that we had common interest in. Junior made the comment one day, ‘You guys need to cut an album of your own to sell at the table to showcase Heather and her vocals and songwriting.’ We can actually give him credit.”

Explaining the difference between the two bands, Tony noted, “Junior’s music is super traditional, and what we’re doing is more modern. We have planned that when we play, Heather has a pickup on her guitar, Jonathan has one, and I’ll have one. It’ll be a completely different sound. That is kind of hard to imagine coming from the same band, but we all have such different interests that once we get away from the traditional music of Junior, the other music starts to bleed in more.”

As the word Collective in their name implies, Heather said, “We don’t want to narrow ourselves to any style of bluegrass or Americana. We all have open minds.” She added that her bandmates are so talented musically. “They’re capable of so much, so we have several different styles going on in this first album, and honestly, I still feel like we’ve just began to scratch the surface of what we can do vocally and instrumentally.”

The members of Red Camel Collective recognize that bluegrass has room for a wide range of styles without moving away from tradition. After all, they noted, when Bill Monroe originated his bluegrass style, he was considered progressive. Acknowledging the wide range of influences, Tony said, “Earl Scruggs’s favorite music was big band swing. That was totally outside of the genre of country at that time.”

Heather added, “I’m sure Scruggs was listening to just as much Roy Acuff, but he always said that most of what he got came from swing music, musicians like Harry James and Benny Goodman, so it was already outside of its place. [Music will] always come out sounding like you, but you can hear those other influences. And it’s just amazing. That’s art.”

Heather’s vocal talent is a distinctive part of the art of Red Camel Collective. Even before the IBMA Momentum Award, Mabe was garnering accolades from leaders in the industry, including the late Dixie Hall and Peter Cooper. She has also drawn comparisons to other artists known for their vocal skills. Her clear, pure voice carries the lead on most of the tracks of the album, supported by the harmonies of the band members and guest vocalists. 

Heather is quick to point out that both Tony and Johnathan have lead vocals on the album, giving texture to the project. Describing Tony’s authenticity as a singer, she noted, “He was raised by his great grandparents, so he is totally from another generation, and that comes across in his singing. His voice sounds like something from years ago, but it’s totally authentic.” On the album, he covers Faron Young’s “Night Coach out of Dallas,” one of the more traditional tracks on the project.

Johnathan Dillon sings lead on “Leaving You and Mobile Too,” an old Lost and Found song well suited to the timbre of his voice. Heather noted, “I love to hear John sing lead, but I have to twist his arm to get him to do it.” Dillon shines on mandolin, as well as contributing to vocals. 

Dillon is also considered the resident bus expert, a skill he learned when his family used buses as motor homes to travel to festivals. As a musician and a bus driver, John has worked with or for Diamond Rio, Joe Mullins, Rhonda Vincent, Doyle Lawson, Lonesome River Band, Kody Norris, The Grascals, and more. He first met Tony and Heather when he was around nine or ten, attending those same festivals and jamming together. They took different paths but reconnected at the end of 2019, when Sisk was filling positions in the band when, Dillon said, “He mentioned the idea of Heather and Tony coming on as a package deal.”

The band’s bassist Curt Love got an early start in music. He says, “I got started playing mandolin when I was about eight years old; I finally gave that up and started playing banjo. I learned it on my own and played with some bands around here, just local and jamming. 

“One day, I saw Junior [Sisk] posted on Facebook that he needed a bass player, and I messaged him. I didn’t have a bass at the time, but I borrowed one and tried out. I’ve been here ever since.” To get ready for his new role in the band, he says, “I played for six hours a day for two weeks and learned all the music.”  Tony added, “He learned more bass in six weeks than I knew in twelve years.”

On the album, the band was accompanied by Jeff Parton and Gaven Largent on Dobro and Michael Cleveland and Stephen Burnwell on fiddle.

According to the band members, the dynamics of Red Camel Collective is much like a family. Dillon noted, “People ask me from time to time what it’s like traveling with a married couple and I can honestly say that Heather and Tony are two of the easiest people that you will ever travel with. There are no complications. Everybody’s on the same page, which I think is the key. If you’re after the same goal, everything else falls into place.”

In advance of the album, set to launch on February 22, the band released three singles from the project, as well as an original holiday single, “Christmas Through the Eyes of a Child,” written by Heather. She also penned the single “Sincerity.” Dale Ann Bradley encouraged the band to record and made the initial contact with Pinecastle on their behalf. She also suggested they put their spin on “Last Time I Saw Him,” a hit for Dottie West in 1974. 

“[Dale Ann] had that song in her back pocket for a long, long time,” said Heather. “We wanted to come up with an arrangement that paid tribute to the Nashville A team, the team that recorded the Dottie West version because it was so epic—but with bluegrass instruments. You can definitely hear that [Nashville] influence, but it’s bluegrass.”

Her favorite part of the project, she said, “was having Suzanne Cox and Sharon White sing with me on that song. They each get a verse to sing, and their voices are just incredible. [I loved] getting to sing harmony with them on that.”  

Michael Cleveland also played fiddle on that single. Tony said, “He was originally just going to play one fiddle part on it, but when it came back, he had put full triple fiddles the whole way through.”

Heather has been writing songs, she says, since she was a teenager, but quit writing for a stretch because she didn’t feel her songs were good enough. “I had songwriter envy,” she explained. “I want to be a wonderful writer like all these people I look up to—like Shawn Camp and Tim O’Brien.” 

Another obstacle to writing came in 2021, when Tony went completely blind after years of poor vision. For a while, their attention was focused on dealing with his loss of sight, Tony said, “instead of trying to write songs.”  

At some point, though, Heather said “[songs]started pouring out of me like therapy. I am finally able to write as sort of a release and to share stories of what I’ve been through and, hopefully, that can help and encourage other people.”

When she writes, Heather says, she strives for authenticity. She noted, “I heard an archaeologist who said, ‘I can dig a hole and see how somebody lived 7,000 years ago.’ And he said, ‘I realized they had the exact same problems that I have today: They needed food. They needed shelter. They needed comfort. They needed relationships. They needed some way to provide everything.’ If you’re going through something, whether that’s happiness or sadness, somebody else is going through the same thing.”

Heather wrote five of the original songs for the album: “All I Need,” “Dare to Dream,” “In Spite of Me,” “Sincerity,” as well as “Daughter of the Stars,” which will be released as a single with a video near the time of the album release. While the other band members have not written songs for the band, Tony sometimes serves as editor and first listener for Heather’s songs.

Tony has had to deal with the effect of the loss of his sight on his musicianship. He originally learned to read music in middle school and high school band, but found that was not practical for bluegrass. However, blindness has changed how he played. He explained, “I did not realize how much I relied on vision once I got past the seventh fret.”  While he had played several instruments, he decided to focus on banjo until he could play up the neck again. 

Describing his process, Tony said, “I started with the song ‘Ground Speed.’ It’s a little bit of an odd tune—complicated for a Scruggs tune. But as I started working on it, my style completely changed, but without trying to change it. If I did anything up the neck, I had to do walks and slides to find the notes. I feel like it made me sound more like Sonny Osborne out of necessity. But I actually enjoy playing now more than I ever have. It’s more of an outlet.”

Heather insists that they are all excited about the future of Red Camel Collective, and with the talent and camaraderie her band members bring to the group, she says, “I just feel like the sky’s the limit.”