Laura Orshaw

Solitary Diamond

Photo by Scott Simontacchi

Solitary Diamond, the title of Laura Orshaw’s debut album, resonates on a number of levels. The words themselves come from a couple of songs from the project, but they refer to a concept, too.

The songs on Solitary Diamond, she says, tell stories from different vantage points of those small-town heroes that people may never hear about, Laura says. “Like a solitary diamond, they’re by themselves, going against the grain, but they’re something special.” At this point in her career, Orshaw also knows how to follow her heart, all the while managing an ideal balance in her career. She launches this solo venture at a time when her schedule as a member of The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys is particularly busy after the lull imposed by the pandemic. 

“We were on the top of our game in the beginning of 2020. We had our busiest January ever,” Laura said. The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys played the Grand Ole Opry for the first time in October of 2019. They also walked the red carpet at the Grammy Awards ceremony when their album Toil, Tears, & Trouble was up for “Best Bluegrass Album” in January 2020. Then, as everyone knows, things went quiet for a while. While the band spent time apart, Orshaw began working on her solo project, gathering material, and honing the songs.

“It was refreshing to be home. I was able to dig into music in a new way, not running around all the time,” Orshaw said. “I could turn on some music and listen to whatever inspired me and not think, ‘I’ve got to get up at six in the morning and fly somewhere,’” she added. “When the moment struck me, I could just sit and be with the music. That was the opportunity that time off the road gave me.”

Orshaw started her solo project right after recording a new album with The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys. She said, “We got back to putting out new music for people. We decided we were just going to have faith that we’d be able to perform it. Right after that, things started picking up.” As canceled shows were rescheduled, she says, the band found themselves “jumping all over the country—no routing or anything.”

Orshaw has been a permanent member of The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys since 2020 after playing fiddle with a few other national touring bands. She toured with Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass when their regular fiddle player had work conflicts, and she toured with The Tennessee Mafia Jug Band before joining Alan Bibey and Grasstowne for nearly three years. During that time, she filled in with The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys before officially joining them as their fifth member.

While she anticipates an album launch in Nashville and her home in Boston, she remains fully engaged with the band, who have been supportive of her solo project.  “They were very involved as I picked the material, helping me think through things. The band is performing some of the singles from the solo project, so I’ll be able to get that music out there with this super-busy touring band and sell the project on the road,” says Orshaw. 

While she calls herself an introvert at heart, Orshaw says she has always loved performing. “I feel like I connect with people in a very true way while performing. I connect with other musicians on the stage and people in the audience too. While I’m playing, I love to look into the crowd and see different people that are into the song,” she says. 

She enjoys talking to people after shows, getting to know them, or just hearing that a song she sang reminded them of something in their lives. She also enjoys being a part of PRB’s “energetic stage show.” Just as Orshaw was getting ready to launch her solo album, she recorded her first single as lead vocalist with The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, a rendition of Hazel Dickens’ “Ramblin’ Woman.” Orshaw wanted to honor Dickens’ singing and songwriting, of which she has been a fan for her entire career.

“She was poking fun about all those ‘rambling men’ out there and saying, ‘Well I’m a rambling woman,’” said Orshaw. She considers Hazel Dickens one of the artists with the DC area traditional bluegrass sound that inspired her, along with the Johnson Mountain Boys. She also counts Lynn Morris and Danny Paisley among her greatest influences.  “If I get to where I don’t feel like practicing,” Laura says, “I turn on some of that music and I can’t wait to get my fiddle out. I also listen to some related genres—folk and old-time, Scottish and Irish music. I like to go a little outside the genre for ideas on how to think about bluegrass music in a fresh way.”

When selecting songs for Solitary Diamond, Orshaw pulled from that wide range of influences. She has also done some co-writing with PRB bandmate Josh “Jug” Rinkel. One of their songs, “Lonely Is My Name,” which she describes as classic country modeled after George Jones, is on the album. 

For other material, she spent time listening through her record collection and seeking out field recordings from Smithsonian Folkways and other sources. She also loves to discover new songs at live shows. 

“I like looking at albums that are not from well-known bluegrass musicians. A song may be in a totally different genre of music, but I see it fitting in bluegrass and start working with the arrangement,” she says. She sometimes takes songs and reverses the perspective. 

“As a woman that really likes traditional bluegrass, I know a lot of the songs have been sung by men. That’s been the perspective forever, so I just get more and more adventurous: Let’s look at that a different way. I wonder what this person in the story might have to say about that. It’s been fun to play around with that. A song might have been sung from the guy’s perspective, but there’s a girl in the story. I think, ‘Wait a second! I could just flip a couple of things around and get a totally different story.’” 

Orshaw did just that in her duet with Trey Hensley released in March, “On Her Own.” She describes it as a “country Dolly Parton-Porter Wagner or George Jones-Melba Montgomery kind of vibe.” Since there were not many women singling lead in first-generation bluegrass, especially in touring bands, she looked elsewhere for models. 

“I wanted songs that fit in with that era. Since there weren’t many women in bluegrass doing that in the 1950s, I looked to 1950s country music and found some great models in women singers. That’s always been a big influence on me. I try to bring that vocal styling into bluegrass music that fits with the style of the early bluegrass days but is true to my experience.” 

The single “On Her Own” was written by Jim Ringer, who wrote in the 70s for a lot of the Outlaw Country singers. Laura called it “one of those rabbit hole things” when she found his name on one of his songs and kept digging. “On Her Own” hadn’t been cut by anybody, but Ringer had performed the song, told from the man’s perspective about a woman and man who sang together, until she went out on her own. 

Orshaw says, “I immediately identified with it from the other side. I understand whether it’s male-female singing partners or playing with a group of people, it’s such a special experience making music with somebody, but you get to the point where you have to make a change and see it through by yourself in your own way. You still feel a little loss—even if it goes great.”

Laura Orshaw’s musical roots go back to her home on the New York-Pennsylvania border. It’s not exactly where people would expect to find bluegrass music, she notes, but people years before moved up from the Appalachian region for work, bringing their music with them. According to Laura, her grandmother Betty “had a beautiful Kitty Wells, Wilma Lee Cooper kind of voice,” that Laura always had in her head. Her dad’s bluegrass band played locally, and the family spent family weekend outings at bluegrass festivals, camping and jamming. 

At twelve, Orshaw joined her father’s bluegrass band, The Lonesome Road Ramblers. She had started playing bluegrass fiddle at ten, so when the fiddle player left the band, her father asked if she was ready.

“It was a great space to continue learning. I realized how much I loved performing. I was shy back then about getting up to the microphone, nervous and embarrassed about singing. The fiddle allowed me to build more confidence,” says Orshaw. 

The confidence was not misplaced. She started taking music lessons from a Julliard-trained classical violinist at the music store where her father worked. The woman taught Laura with technique from classical style but let her play fiddle tunes. Laura calls it “the best of both worlds.” When her music teacher decided to change careers, her other students convinced Laura—who was further on in the book—to teach them. 

“I was 12 or 13 years old, and most of them were women in their 50s or 60s. They were retired and had taken on music late, and I thought, ‘Well I guess I could teach you.’” She got a reputation as a music teacher and continued through high school. 

Orshaw moved to Boston and learned a lot from that music scene where she found some incredible fiddle players. There weren’t, however, a lot of singers in the area, so she was frequently called on to sing.  She realized music was more than just a hobby while touring with Alan Bibey. She was working with top-caliber musicians, playing a wide range of material—modern and progressive, jazzy and traditional. 

Orshaw says, “I wanted to step it up, to know that I could play every time it comes around at the top level.” She wanted to be sure she could maintain the consistency, no matter what stage she played on or what was going on around her. “I worked hard, and that made me feel like a professional musician. I had to be able to do it at that capacity, at this level with people like them around me and live up to it.” Touring with Bibey, she says, and playing shows as a guest with PRB made her take performing more seriously and make it a priority. 

The professionalism is paying off as Orshaw continues to perform with PRB as she releases the first singles from Solitary Diamond. Working with Stephen Mougin at his Dark Shadow Recording Studio has brought the project together for her. Mougin’s connections with the bluegrass scene in Nashville and beyond have been a bonus. She said she had ideas of musicians she wanted on the project from playing and working with other people, but she wasn’t sure about singers.

She hadn’t had much opportunity to work with other vocalists singing harmony with her. She wondered about how to mix vocals with the right instrumental backdrop and was able to trust Mougin as a counselor and advisor to decide how to arrange the harmony parts and stay true to the songs. What resulted, she says, was a dream list. Along with Hensley, she also had Ronnie and Garnet Bowman, Tim O’Brien, Alecia Nugent, Lindsey Lou, Jenee Fleenor, Alan Bartram, and Stephen and Jana Mougin providing harmony on the tracks. Nugent sang on several tracks, including the tenor vocals on “Hank,” the first single off the project. An up-tempo bluegrass song, Orshaw says “Hank” felt right for the first release. 

BB Bowness, who played banjo on the whole project, had introduced Orshaw to the Tattletale Saints, a band from her native New Zealand, when the two met in Boston.  “‘Hank’ was actually written by them,” said Orshaw, but it was “totally a different song—a slow, beautiful folk thing. I just loved their music, and I always kept that song in my head. I kept thinking to myself, isn’t it just incredible that somebody on the other side of the globe wrote that song about Hank Williams music and it made them feel just like I feel?”

As Orshaw releases Solitary Diamond, she can expect to find that her music too will evoke those same universal feelings from her fans around the globe as well.