Addie Levy
The Brothers Have a Sister
Photo By Shana Leigh
The Brothers Comatose is a San Francisco, California based five-piece bluegrass band that have headlined festivals such as Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, High Sierra Music Festival, and the Kate Wolf Music Festival and toured with Yonder Mountain String Band, Lake Street Drive and A.J. Lee and Blue Summit. Since the band started in 2009, they have built a strong and loyal fan-base through their live performances, recordings and YouTube channel, where they present “Ear Snacks” joined by guests such as Lindsey Lou, A.J. Lee, Crying Uncle, Celia Woodsmith, Jim Lauderdale and many others.
The band features front man Ben Morrison and his brother Alex (guitar and banjo, respectively) along with Steve Height on bass, Philip Brezina on violin, and the newest member (as of October of 2024) Addie Levy on mandolin. Addie joined the band when mandolinist Greg Fleischut left to pursue other musical interests. Acoustic Guitar Magazine describes their music as an “upbeat brand of Americana with lots of twang, a dash of wit, and a splash of surrealism.”
Addie Levy is a very talented young singer and multi-instrumentalist raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. By the time Addie came to the band, The Brothers Comatose had been an active band for eleven years before Addie had graduated high school. So, how does a young female bluegrass mandolin player from Virginia join up with a group of rock influenced bluegrass musicians from California? That is what I wanted to know when I discovered that she had become member of the band. So, I called Addie to ask her about it.
Addie’s Bluegrass Background
Addie started singing in church when she was young but said that, even though her father, Jeff, played music, she was never interested in learning how to play an instrument until her family took a vacation to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and they went to see a Dolly Parton’s Stampede. At the show she met Gary “Biscuit” Davis and he recommended she learn to play. She said, “Gary was Dolly’s old band leader and I got to talking to him after the show and he encouraged me to start playing. I sang a couple of lines for him and he said, ‘That is great! You should learn how to play an instrument so that you can back yourself up.’ I went home and started taking guitar lessons from Dad the next week. I played guitar from about five months until the only time that I ever got grounded in my life. I can’t even tell you what I did. I found a mandolin in the house and while I was grounded, at the age of ten, I started to learn how to play mandolin. I still played guitar, but I started to focus more on mandolin. About a month later, I met the members of my first bluegrass band and they invited me to join. So, I’d only been playing instruments for about six months when I joined my first band.”
Addie’s love for bluegrass music blossomed when she started going to jam sessions in Radford, Virginia and at the Floyd Country Store in Floyd, Virginia. While she initially started learning mandolin by watching YouTube videos and searching Google for mandolin chord charts, she found her primary teacher, David Cannaday when she started attending jams and shows at the Floyd Country Store. Addie said, “David taught me guitar and mandolin at the Floyd Country Store for a couple of years. The Floyd Country Store has been a huge supporter of me for everything that I’ve done in music. I have had a long history with them.”
The first band that Addie joined—the Gravel Road Bluegrass Band—was a youth band consisting of kids that were all ages ten to twelve. She said, “The band had already started and then they needed a mandolin player. We had our first show at the Floyd Country Store. Most of the kids in the band lived in Floyd and when I first met the guitar player Nick Weitzenfeld. I thought, ‘Wow, he is really good and he is almost my age!’ I was so baffled by how amazing he was and to this day he is one of the best guitar players that I know. He was the guitar player for the Tray Wellington Band for the past couple of years.” The other members of the band included Jared Houseman on bass, Adam Bishop on banjo and Lydia Bowman on fiddle. The band stayed together for about five years and played at events and festivals like the SPGMA event in Nashville, the IBMA event in Raleigh, North Carolina, Merlefest in North Carolina and FloydFest in Floyd, Virginia. One of the highlights of Addie’s time with the band was opening up a show for Ralph Stanley. She said, “That was a great memory.”
In addition to performing with the Gravel Road Bluegrass Band, Addie and her father started performing at the Barbeque & Bluegrass Festival at Dollywood once a year. Then, while in high school, Addie and the bass player from Gravel Road started a new band called Gate 10. That band stayed together for about three years (2018 to 2021). All of the members of Gate 10 where either in high school or their early college years. Gate 10 included Jared Houseman on bass, Ethan and Eric Handy (banjo and Dobro, respectively), Jarrod Belcher on guitar and Gabe Scott on fiddle. Both the Gravel Road Bluegrass Band and Gate 10 recorded albums and both bands held their album release performances at the Floyd Country Store.
From the time she was ten years old through her high school years, in addition to playing with her bands, Addie continued to jam as much as she could. She said, “It was the coolest childhood ever. I went to Galax and all of the fiddler’s conventions and made good friends throughout Virginia and North Carolina. We had such a cool generation of musicians that grew up together. I grew up with all of the kids in Shadowgrass, and Tray Wellington and Liam Purcell, to name a few who are now playing music full-time. It was so fun. We were competitive, but in a fun way. We supported each other.”
After she graduated high school in 2020, the Gate 10 band “fizzled out” during COVID and Addie attended community college online due to the COVID pandemic. Then, in the fall of 2021, she became a full-time performer at Dollywood for nearly two years. She said, “I’ve done about every role at Dollywood now. I’ve done the roving performer, walking around the park and interacting with guests. I’ve performed in their concert series, headlined in a couple of the theaters and played in the house band for one of their production shows. I’ve walked in their parade with Dolly and then the highlight of working there was being in Dolly’s Christmas movie. I was the mandolin player in the Dolly Parton Mountain Magic Christmas movie. I’m not playing in it, but I’m the actor of the mandolin player. Getting to film with Dolly for four days was the coolest experience ever. She was so nice.”
The Brothers Comatose
In 2023, Addie left Dollywood to play in the house band for an artist that had a residency at the City Winery in Nashville. Shortly after moving to Nashville is when Addie got the call to start substituting for the mandolin player in The Brothers Comatose. She said, “The original mandolin player had some other stuff going on, so I started just filling in. I did a couple of dates in 2023 and some in the winter of 2024. I was really only supposed to sub for a couple of dates in 2024, but I became an official member of the band in October of 2024.”
When I asked Addie how she met The Brothers Comatose, I was surprised to hear her answer because she said, “I had actually never met them before I started subbing in.” She explained, “I had a friend, Jesse, who played in the band Water Tower. His bandmate, Kenny, who I had never met but he knew me through the association with Jesse, referred me to The Brothers Comatose manager, Casey, and then Casey called me. I had never met Kenny, Casey, or anybody involved in this. I tribute all of this to the power of social media. Kenny had been following me on social media and that is how I got that reference to The Brothers Comatose manager. Casey had called Kenny asking if he knew anybody who could sub on mandolin and Kenny gave him my name and contact information. Casey called me and said, ‘I checked out all of your stuff, do you want to start subbing in?’ I had been a fan of the band for years and it was so scary because the first show that I was subbing in was a headlining festival show and since they had a show the day before, we were not going to get a rehearsal. They sent me a YouTube video to learn everything off of, and we just went up there and did the thing. It was the coolest thing ever. I was very nervous, but it was the most fulfilling night and they are the best people to work with and they are so fun. It has been a blessing to continue with them.”
Since The Brothers Comatose had built a large base of fans over the years with the original band configuration — and sometimes ardent fans can be resistant to accepting band changes — I asked Addie how the fans have received her. She said, “They have been so supportive. It has been so nice to be welcomed into their family — because that is really what it is. It has been so awesome.”
When asked about the “Ear Snacks” collaborations, Addie said, “It is super cool to get to collaborate. During one of my first shows filling in with them Lindsay Lou got on stage and sang and I was like ‘Oh, my gosh!’ I was freaking out because I love Lindsay Lou. It was so cool. And we just got off the road spending two weeks with A.J. Lee and it was awesome.”
When asked about what she has to look forward to in 2025 with The Brothers Comatose, Addie said, “My calendar is filling up and I love it. It is about to get real crazy and I’m excited about it.”
Addie Levy and the Avalanche
During the time in 2024 that Addie was subbing on mandolin for The Brothers Comatose, she started her own band and released a self-titled album in July of 2024. The title of one of her songs, “Avalanche,” inspired the band name. Joining Addie in the Avalanche are Jared Houseman of bass, Ethan Ratliff on guitar, Taylor Shuck on banjo and Ella Hennessee on fiddle. Addie said, “We are playing on the side for fun when I’m not out with The Brothers Comatose. Playing music with my best friends is basically what that is…Jared is like the closest thing to a sibling that I’ve ever had because I’m an only child. So, we’ve played music quite a bit together.”
Addie Levy is one of the rising stars in bluegrass music. She is a tremendous talent, both as a singer and an instrumentalist. Although she has already accomplished quite a bit for someone in her early twenties, I have the feeling that she is just getting started and we will be hearing a lot more from her in the future.
Do yourself a favor and check her out with The Brothers Comatose or with Addie Levy and the Avalanche, either performing live or on any one of the many videos you can find online. Once you watch her play and sing, you’ll know why a highly popular and established band from San Francisco, California hired this young woman from the hills of Virginia to be in the band after watching her play and sing on those videos. Visit www.addielevy.com.
