Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee

Finding a new favorite band through a performance or recording is one of the ultimate joys of being a music fan. Last June, at the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley, the Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee took the stage Friday afternoon for their first set of the weekend. 

Three songs into their set, that old familiar feeling took hold—a new favorite. This was hard-edged bluegrass from an earlier time, music straight from the heart with nary a bit of modern flash or showbiz glitz. It was an earthy, honest, powerful sound.

The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee is a five-piece band headquartered in Floyd, Virginia. The band describes its approach as “old time country music,” and that’s an accurate description. Their music is deeply rooted in the historical sweet spot of the 1940s and early 1950s, before bluegrass, old-time, and mountain music were arbitrarily separated into distinct styles with semi-rigid borders.

“The cool and unique thing about the band,” says Ashlee Watkins, “is that we are all old-time musicians who also really love country music and bluegrass music. The band started out playing dances and competing at fiddlers’ conventions, and things just naturally progressed into bluegrass, but really that old style that lives in the gray area between.” Ted Lundy and the Southern Mountain Boys and Larry Richardson and the Blue Ridge Boys are mentioned as influences whose music also lived in that gray area.

Andrew Small was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. One of his earliest musical influences was Doc Watson, and Andrew began playing guitar and bass at age ten. He picked up the mandolin soon after and, a few years later, the fiddle and banjo. 

His focus in high school, however, was studying and playing the double bass in the school orchestra. He earned a Master’s Degree in Double Bass Performance from Yale and played with a few symphonies. Degree in hand, however, Andrew decided that he didn’t really want to be a full-time professional orchestral bassist. He knew that bluegrass and old-time music was what he wanted to play.

After touring with several bands, Andrew was invited to Australia to play with fiddler George Jackson (a native of New Zealand who now lives in Nashville), and he and Jackson formed a band called One Up, Two Down with guitarist Daniel Watkins, who happened to have a sister named Ashlee.

Ashlee Watkins was born in the Australian state of New South Wales in a town called Newcastle, roughly 100 miles north of Sydney. She “was raised on bluegrass music,” as her guitar-playing father was a huge fan. She was more of a listener than a musician when she met Andrew on one of his trips Down Under.

Romance bloomed, and after several visits back and forth, Ashlee moved to the U.S., where they married and eventually settled in the southwestern Virginia town of Floyd in 2019. Andrew taught Ashlee to play guitar so she could back him on the fiddle, and they began singing duets. 

Performing as Ashlee Watkins and Andrew Small, they recorded a duet album, Dear Companion, in 2022, and were featured on the cover of a Japanese bluegrass magazine, Moon Shiner, last year. They have been featured twice in the IBMA Songwriter Showcase and won first prize in the bluegrass song category at the 29th Annual Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest with Andrew’s song “Yesterday’s Blues.”

When they played at fiddlers’ conventions and dances in the region, Andrew and Ashlee started performing with other musicians added to the mix, and that led to the idea of forming a full-fledged bluegrass band. They played with a rotating cast of musicians in the early days of the band, but soon latched onto a phenomenal young banjo player named Trevor Holder (see BU, 10/25) they had met at Galax. “Trevor is my ultimate banjo player,” says Andrew.” He ticks all the boxes.”

Born in Ringgold, Georgia, a small town not quite twenty miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Holder is that rare player who has mastered virtually all styles of country banjo playing, from clawhammer and two-finger picking to the three-finger stylings of Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, J.D. Crowe, and countless other bluegrass masters.

The band has recorded two albums, Live at WPAQ and Live at WPAQ II. Both albums were recorded live in the studio of WPAQ, a legendary radio station in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Most of the 37 (!) cuts on the two albums were done in a single take, with the band standing in a circle around a single microphone, an old RCA ribbon model.

The personnel on the first album, recorded in the fall of 2023, included Andrew (mandolin, fiddle, vocals), Ashlee (guitar, banjo, vocals), Trevor (banjo, vocals), Conner Vlietstra (fiddle, guitar, vocals), and Austin Janey (bass). It’s a great showcase for the band’s unique and distinctive sound and highlights abound: “Just Let Me Fall,” on which Trevor and Ashlee recreate the three-finger/clawhammer duet of Larry Richardson and Happy Smith’s classic Blue Ridge recording from the early 1950s; “Little Annie,” a tip of the hat to Vern & Ray and the Lilly Brothers; compelling Andrew-Ashley duets: “Just My Heart” and their original “You Don’t Care”; some vocal trios and a quartet; a pair of fiddle tunes, “Polecat Blues” and “16 Days in Georgia,” and Trevor’s blistering original, “Toast ‘Em Dry.”

By the time Live at WPAQ II was recorded in 2024, the band’s lineup had shifted to include AJ Srubas on fiddle and Rina Rossi on bass. Srubas and Rossi, a married couple from Minneapolis, are central figures in the Twin Cities bluegrass, old-time, and dance scenes as musicians, educators, and advocates.

Competing in both old-time and bluegrass categories, AJ has won multiple ribbons in both individual and band competitions at the fiddlers’ conventions at Clifftop, Galax, and Mount Airy. In2023, AJ and Rina released their first album as a duo, Sweet Bunch of Daisies.

 “We got to know AJ and Rina,” says Andrew, “and we really hit it off, as friends as well as musically. We had really similar tastes. The chemistry between us all was the main thing. That just felt like the right line-up for our touring band.”

Live at WPAQ II is another highly satisfying slice of traditional mountain bluegrass, with material drawn from the repertoires of Vern & Ray, Buzz Busby, the Stanley Brothers, Rebe & Rabe, Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, the Osborne Brothers, Tommy Magness, and others. As before, there’s another bunch of fine Andrew-Ashlee duets: “Thinking of Home,” Home Among the Hills,” “Each Time I Start Stepping,” and “I’d Rather Forget,” the latter two songs written by Andrew and Ashlee.

 The second album sounds a bit more assured and confident, especially instrumentally, with Andrew, Trevor, and AJ firing on all cylinders. The album’s four instrumentals—“Daybreak in Dixie,” “Sunny Mountain Chimes,” Florida Blues,” and “Coming Down from Roanoke”—are powerful, dynamic, and exciting performances. Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith’s “Florida Blues,” essentially a banjo-fiddle duet, is especially fine. “I’ve never heard anybody back up a fiddle tune the way Trevor does,” says Andrew. “He knows just what to play and when to play it.”

Fiddlers’ conventions and the contests they offer are still an important part of the musical culture in many parts of the southern U.S. The three main such conventions are held annually in Mount Airy, North Carolina, Galax, Virginia, and Clifftop, West Virginia, and the members of the Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee are regulars at all three.

Most recently, in 2025, Andrew won the fiddle contest at Clifftop. AJ Srubas won the bluegrass fiddle contest at Mount Airy. The New Floyd County Ramblers (a band consisting of Andrew, Ashlee, Hannah Traynham, and Austin Janey put together for dances and contests) won first place in the old time band contests at Mount Airy (last two years in a row) and at Clifftop in 2025.  The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee won the old-time band contest at Galax in 2021 and the bluegrass band contest at Mount Airy in 2023.

The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee—the band name is an homage to North Carolina fiddler Ernest East and his band, the Pine Ridge Boys & Patsy—have a steady amount of work around southwestern Virginia at dances, festivals, and concerts when not on the road. They’ve toured the country extensively, with festival appearances as far afield as Minnesota, California, Maine, New York, Illinois (the University of Chicago Folk Festival), Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington.

The band has also done an impressive amount of international touring for a relatively new outfit. The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee have done a six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand, as well as performing at festivals and concert appearances in Germany and France (La Roche Bluegrass Festival). The band will make its Canadian debut in June 2026 at the Cowichan Valley Bluegrass Festival in British Columbia.

The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee have found something new by looking to the past. Though rooted in an earlier time, the band’s mountain bluegrass sound is neither dated nor self-consciously retro. In fact, heard in the context of a multi-act bluegrass festival, the band comes across as a breath of fresh air, a break from the usual. “We’re so different from most of the other bands,” says Ashlee, “and audiences really seem to appreciate what we’re doing.”

 There’s a lot to appreciate about this band. The band’s instrumental front line of Andrew, Trevor, and AJ is second to none on today’s bluegrass scene. The material, quite a bit of it fairly obscure, is well-chosen and interesting. The duet singing of Andrew and Ashlee is powerful and compelling, with a bit of the bark left on. Either of their CDs sounds like it could be a lost volume from Rounder’s celebrated “Early Days of Bluegrass” series from the 1970s (and that’s meant as a very high compliment).

The Alum Ridge Boys & Ashlee seem to be poised on the brink of a breakthrough. The members of the band are ready for it, quietly confident that—given the chance—they can win over just about any audience. 

“The festival gigs and the bigger things that have happened for us,” says Andrew, “have been organic, with people reaching out to us. It’s been really amazing. When this music connects with the right people, they get really excited about it. The people who like it, really like it. We have a niche, and it’s working out pretty well for us.”