Balsam Range
Celebrating 15 Years of Bringing Western North Carolina Bluegrass to the World
Photo By Caty Smith
When it comes to the top tier of bands that have found success in this uniquely-American music genre we call bluegrass, the story of the rise of Balsam Range is tale of good things coming from an impromptu house jam, and the fulfillment of a region in the U.S. that has had an Appalachian string music tradition going back hundreds of years.
When Marc Pruett, Caleb Smith, Buddy Melton, Darren Nicholson and Tim Surrett all drove over to Nicholson’s house in the mountains of western North Carolina to jam on some bluegrass music on a cold December night 16 years ago, there was no intent of forming a band. Sometimes, however, good things happen when music brings people together. Once the potential of their collaboration began to reveal itself at that first jam, with each note played and each harmony vocal shared; these five bluegrass artists soon decided to become a group.
At first just a local entity, the quintet’s talent and power of intent congealed and kicked in quickly. With the help of others, such as bluegrass DJ Kyle Cantrell who latched onto their first album; it all steadily propelled Balsam Range to the top of the bluegrass world. As their career gained steam, the group would win two IBMA “Vocal Group of the Year” awards, three IBMA “Song of the Year” awards and two IBMA “Album of the Year” nods. They would also go on to win the highly-coveted IBMA “Entertainer of the Year” honor two times.
The story of the road to success by Balsam Range is both a fun and purposeful narrative. In this article celebrating the 15th anniversary of the band, Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine interviews all five members with the intent of capturing the inside scoop on the rise of one of the genre’s most popular groups.
First of all, the talent of all five men was already apparent long before the quintet formed. One amazing fact that we will also keep coming in this story is that all five musicians are from the same county and still live in the same county a decade and a half later. Haywood County is located just west of Asheville in the western half of North Carolina that features the highest mountains east of the Rockies, with Mt. Mitchell rising up to 6,684 feet above sea level. Somewhere between Boone and Cherokee, the Blue Ridge Mountains turn into the Great Smoky Mountains. In Haywood County and surrounds, a small subsection of hills called the Great Balsam Mountains exists.
Beautiful in every way, these mountains feature six peaks that rise above 6,000 feet. After almost a hundred attempts at coming up with a band name, one day the newly-formed group unfolded a local map onto a table and found the name ‘Balsam Range’ and the rest, as they say, is history.
As we all know, a bluegrass outfit staying intact for 15 years with no personnel changes is highly unusual, and the fact that all of the members of Balsam Range live in the same county has encouraged their unity. While many bands have to drive hundreds of miles to meet at the tour bus, this outfit simply meets at the nearby Ingles Grocery store in Canton. The story of the life of each band member before that fateful first jam session is a bit complicated.
Marc Pruett had just come off the road after multiple years with Ricky Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder. He also had previous stints with Jimmy Martin, James Monroe and other artists on his resumé. Tim Surrett had just finished a decade-long run with gospel greats The Kingsmen and became a go-to studio musician.
As for Buddy Melton, I first met him in Nashville around 2004 when he was the fiddler in the band Jubal Foster, headed up by the future IBMA “Songwriter of the Year” Milan Miller. Miller, at the time, was a hot-pickin’ Telecaster master, and still is, although he doesn’t get his electric axe out of his case enough these days.
Meanwhile, back then, Caleb Smith was pursuing his knowledge of instrument repair after ending a run with the bluegrass gospel group called Harvest. Darren Nicholson came along as the young kid on the block having just finished a few years on the road with Alicia Nugent.
The pre-band formational hub in this story is the recording of solo albums by Melton and Nicholson in 2006, both excellent efforts. But before we go any further, let’s have the boys in the band tell the story in their own words.
Life Before The Formation of Balsam Range
Buddy Melton
“I was playing with the Jubal Foster band about the time my wife was pregnant with our daughter, who is 17 now and will be 18 this summer. That was a time when it was the tail end of Jubal Foster and I wanted to stay home and concentrate on raising our first-born child. So, I was just playing around locally with different bands in Haywood County and western North Carolina. I played some with Caleb back then as he was a part of a bluegrass gospel group called Harvest and I filled in with them several times, playing bass or fiddle and singing a little bit.
“Right before Balsam Range formed, I played in a band with Marc called the Whitewater Bluegrass Company, where we did all regional and locally-based shows. Meanwhile, eventually, my wife and I bought the farm and the house that her great grandparents built. Her grandfather lived there until he passed away. We got close to 300 acres that is split by a state road and now we raise sheep on one side and cattle on the other side.”
Caleb Smith
“I had been on the road with a bluegrass gospel band called Harvest and we were together for about three or four years and released a couple of records. We ended that band in early 2006. Tim had been with The Kingsmen for a long time and then played with The Isaacs, and then came back to The Kingsmen for a while and had come off the road about the same time I did. Marc had been on and off with Ricky Skaggs for a while. So, we weren’t doing much of anything then. I was doing guitar repair, which I set up for myself around 2004, and I was also contracting and building homes at the time. I hadn’t started building guitars yet, which would come in late 2007. I started out building guitars as a hobby, just to see if I could do it, but it turned into one of my main gigs. For the past ten years, I’ve been at least 30 guitars behind and that is a stressful thing, but it’s a good problem to have.”
Darren Nicholson
“Before Balsam Range, I played for three years with Alicia Nugent. We were on Rounder Records and Carl Jackson produced those albums and we were touring all over the country. We played the Grand Ole Opry almost every week. It was a pretty busy time for me. I came off the road and made a solo record at the end of 2006, and after it came out, I basically found myself at home and not traveling. Buddy’s solo record also came out at the end of 2006. Tim had come off the road from The Kingsmen and Marc had come off the road with Ricky Skaggs and we all found ourselves at home in western North Carolina.”
Tim Surrett
“I had left The Kingsmen about a year earlier. They had been together since 1956 and were inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2000. I sang on my own after that, mostly in the Southeast and I also did a few solo shows in Canada and out west.
I would just go out and do Sunday Services by myself with a guitar. I enjoyed that, but I couldn’t
maintain it. It was hard to do all of that work by yourself, with the driving and dealing with the sound system and everything else. Plus, I have always enjoyed the group setting more.”
Marc Pruett
“At that time, Buddy and I were playing in a local band called the Whitewater Bluegrass Company. Buddy and I had talked a number of times about trying to play a different style of bluegrass and thinking about how we could play the music we love better and maybe do more original songs. Darren had released a solo record at the time that a few of us played on. By that time, I had been playing bluegrass for 44 years.
“When I would come home from school as a boy, my mom would let me listen to the local radio station that would play country music and for about 30 minutes every afternoon, I would have a little snack before I did my homework. On this little radio station in Waynesville, on a show they called the ‘Cornbread Matinee,’ I was sitting there one day and they featured Flatt and Scruggs and I had never heard that sound before. I was ten years old then. They played ‘Dim Lights And Thick Smoke’ and the ‘Flint Hill Special,’ and they may have even played ‘Earl’s Breakdown’ that day, and it just went straight to my heart. I asked my mother, ‘What is that instrument that the man is playing right there?’ She said, ‘Well son, that’s a banjo.’”
Buddy Melton’s Solo Album circa 2006
Buddy Melton
“I went into the studio to create this self-titled solo project and Marc played on it and Tim played bass on it and it also featured Adam Steffey and Tony Rice. That became the core band. Tim and Tony were close at the time as Tim was filling in on bass now and then with the Tony Rice Unit. Tim reached out to Tony and asked if he wanted to be a part of it, and Tony said, ‘Sure.’ But I didn’t know if Tony would show up until right on the day of the session. When he rolled up in his Mustang, I thought, ‘OK, this is fixin’ to get real here.’ It opened up a great relationship with Tony that I never thought would happen. He loved it and we spent two days in the studio together, and we stayed connected. I’d send him mixes and he’d call me at 3 a.m. in the morning saying, ‘Hey man, I was just listening to this and I think if you take 2 db off the 400k on the guitar, it’d sound good.’
“The original cut of ‘Burning Georgia Down’ was on that solo album and the original cut of ‘Caney Fork River’ was on there as well, meaning multiple songs that would become future iconic Balsam Range songs were on that project. There were songs on there that Milan Miller had written and some from the Jubal Foster days that I compiled. The album was never released to radio. I just recorded it to have something to sell at these local shows. Darren also had a solo project about that same time and some of the guys played on his album as well, so both records stimulated the jam session that turned into 15 years of Balsam Range.”
The Night Balsam Range Was Formed
Darren Nicholson
“Around Christmastime in 2006, we got together for a jam session at my house. The jam session was fun, so we had to figure out if we all wanted to do some local shows here and we thought it would be cool to do it. I don’t think we had any aspirations then of becoming a touring band. But things kind of happened in spite of ourselves. And, we’ve just been lucky, to be honest with you. I can’t say it has been anything else but luck, and we’ve been fortunate enough to find a few good songs, and a lot of it happened because of the support of this community here in western North Carolina.”
Caleb Smith
“We had a mutual friend named Kevin Duckett who runs Smoky Mountain Coffee Roasters and he used to host a jam once a week and that is where I met Buddy and Milan Miller for the first time in 1997. Buddy and I stayed in contact and over the years and we picked together, fished together and hunted together. One day he called me and said, ‘Would you want to jam with Marc and Tim and Darren?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ I hadn’t played any music in a long time. We started jamming and it was very organic. When people have asked me, ‘How have you all done it? What is the secret to success?’ There is a lot of work involved, behind the scenes stuff that nobody sees that involves the business, the money side, the travel side and the product side. We’ve also all had primary jobs with Balsam Range being secondary. But I tell people, there has to be an organic component. A light bulb has to go off and make you think, ‘Oh wow.’ And for us, that went off the first night.”
Marc Pruett
“We thought, ‘Well, why don’t we get together one night and jam and just have some fun with it?’ The third time we did that, it was so good that I remember looking around the room and somebody said, ‘Do you think we should book some shows?’ I had a show in my pocket for a big concert at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville for the comedy team of John Boy and Billy. We booked that show even though we didn’t have a name for the band.”
Tim Surrett
“When we all got together that night, it was BAM, right out the chute. We started singing together, and with Buddy’s voice, none of us had sung with someone that had that kind of range and power, so we could just do whatever song we thought of as there were no limitations to it. We got together the first time and thought it was pretty good and when we got together again in 2007, after the holidays, it was the same. Then Marc said, ‘You know, I got a call for a show over here in Asheville. Do you want to do it?’ Luckily, we were all bluegrass veterans who had a vast bluegrass catalog and knew 10,000 standards. So, we made up some crazy band name and did the show and it kind of snowballed from there.”
Balsam Range has gone through a lot over the last 15 years, from disagreements to time spent in hospital waiting rooms and more. At one point, a cow kicked a metal door hard into Melton’s face as he was loading some cattle, nearly crushing his skull. Along the way, Surrett suffered a bout with a badly bleeding ulcer and last year, Pruett fell of a stage and broke his pickin’ wrist, elbow, arm and left knee only to still play the gig while hurt.
Brotherhood
Darren Nicholson
“We’ve all had our trials and tribulations. I was off for a month in 2018 with personal stuff and we have all been through some things. That is a part of being in a band together and after 15 years, it is kind of like being in a family. People get sick, sometimes, and people have rough stretches, and you have to try and be the best you can be and keep moving forward and try to support each other.”
As far as the music side of things, there have been some key decisions made by the members of Balsam Range that have helped them achieve success. One decision involved the recording of their first album. Originally, they were asked to make a tribute record filled with nothing but Bill Monroe tunes. But after a few sessions, they stopped themselves so they could collectively decide if they were going to be a real and relevant band going forward with original songs, or be a cover band playing the same 20 first generation bluegrass songs over and over again. That led to the second important decision, which has lasted all 15 years.
Once on the path of originality, Balsam Range has shown a constant desire to find newly-written songs to bring to life in the bluegrass style. While all of the members of the band have brought tunes to the table, Melton has been the one to listen through countless demos with the intent of finding magic, which he has done on a consistent basis.
All that has happened to the band musically over the last decade-and-a-half has been witnessed first-hand by bluegrass fans everywhere. For the members of Balsam Range, however, the 15th anniversary feels different. From their view, the music is almost secondary, especially when they look at photos from those early days of their families and their kids and realizing how much they have grown up together.
As the saying goes, once you leave the land of your birth to find success in the big city, “You can never go home again.” With Balsam Range, all of them live where they were raised, and where their children are now being raised, and that is not lost on the band.
Looking Back
Caleb Smith
“Tim always says that the reason we don’t bust up is because we’ll all see each other at the bank or at the grocery store or at church and that would make it weird (laughing). Fifteen years is a long time and I’ll get emotional with you here; time has always been a depressing thing for me. You can’t stop it, you can’t go back, and I see that in my kids. My youngest is 14 years old and he wasn’t even born when Balsam Range started. My oldest is 22 and my middle kid is 20. But with the time factor, you go back and look at photos of album release parties and you see that all of our kids are tiny. All of us in the band have kids and we have all watched our families grow up. While we have missed a lot on the road, with our schedule, we have been able to be a part of a lot of their lives as well.”
Darren Nicholson
“If I could sum the last 15 years up, I’d say I am grateful. Gratitude. I’m grateful for everything that Balsam Range has done for me and my family, and for the doors it has opened and the experiences I’ve lived, and I’m looking forward to the next chapter, whatever that is.”
Marc Pruett
“After my injuries last year, I told my wife that if the music doesn’t come back, I’ll find something else to do that is fun. People think that what I’ve done with the banjo defines my life, but I try not to let that happen. I let it be an important part of my life, but at the same time I don’t let it control me. I’ve told a lot of people that I’m not a gifted singer, but I do have the best seat in the house to hear Balsam Range. I just throw my little banjo part in there and then listen to them sing, which is so fabulous.
“Fifteen years is a long time. That is more than most savings and loans stay in business. I have found in life that one of the biggest things you can do is to be flexible. If you can be flexible and have passion for what you do and have compassion for other people, you can get by pretty good.”
Tim Surrett
“It is stunning to me that we’re doing it 15 years later. None of us thought we’d still be doing this all of these years later, and none of ever thought we’d get to the level we have been blessed to get to. We have become friends with people that we all used to spend money to see.
“I have learned over these years that some of the top names in this business are the best people. There is not a nicer guy on the planet than Béla Fleck or Barry Bales or the guys in Blue Highway, musicians that you have always looked up to. The late Dennis Jones, our old bluegrass radio DJ buddy, he called us the ‘hardest working, part-time bluegrass band ever,’ and we consider ourselves a ‘national local group.’ We don’t overdo it and we’ve always made it a priority to put family first. And, we’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms for each other, and when that happens your families come together and your band comes together and it is pretty galvanizing and that is pretty special.”
Buddy Melton
“Fifteen years feels awesome. I am so honored to be a part of the journey and proud of the friendships we have made along the way. I’m probably most proud of the fact that we have had some positive impact on people through our music. Music is a powerful thing. It will open up a deaf ear and a stubborn mind, and you can say things in a song that you can’t get people to listen to with normal conversation. To have songs like ‘Trains I’ve Missed’ or ‘Grit And Grace,’ or ‘Stacking Up The Rocks,’ which is based on something that personally happened to me, and all of those kinds of songs that can have a profound effect on people; they reach out constantly to tell us how our music has helped them get through something. To me, how can it get any better than that, knowing that in some way your talents and your gifts have given you an opportunity to help somebody else?”
More information can be found at balsamrange.com.
