Mary Meyer
Now Touring with Molly Tuttle
Molly Tuttle showed up at the ROMP Festival in June of 2025 with a new band (it was their fifth performance). The configuration of the band she traveled with during the previous few years, Golden Highway, included acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and upright bass. Her new band was a bit different. While Molly remained on the acoustic guitar, three of the other band members played drums, electric guitar, and electric bass. The fifth band member, Mary Meyer (Mair), alternated between fiddle, mandolin, and keyboards.
While Molly’s music has strayed away from bluegrass a bit in 2025—leaning more towards Americana—she still includes a bluegrass set of songs in the middle of the band’s performance. Molly told me before the show that she especially likes having Mary in the band to play mandolin or fiddle during the bluegrass segment of the show because, like Molly, Mary grew up playing bluegrass.
Bluegrass music fans may recognize Mary’s name from the years she spent playing with her family band, The Meyer Band, or the time she spent playing mandolin with Sister Sadie. When Mary joined that band, I started following her on Instagram and was blown away by her singing, songwriting, and multi-instrumental talent. She frequently posts video clips of her playing licks on various instruments (“lick of the day”) and also posts solo or collaborative song performances. On these videos, she displays her incredible virtuosity on mandolin, electric and acoustic guitars (flatpicked and fingerpicked), keyboards, and banjo. These videos also give a glimpse into Mary’s depth of exploration into musical genres outside of the realm of bluegrass. When she plays, she appears very relaxed and comfortable and the music seems to effortlessly flow out of every pore. When I heard that Molly Tuttle had selected Mary to be the multi-instrumentalist in her new band, it made perfect sense to me. I thought, “Great choice, Molly!”
Background
Mary Meyer was raised in Sheldon, Missouri, a small town of about 500 people just north of Joplin. Mary was number six of ten Meyer children—seven boys and three girls. That means that the twelve people in the Meyer family made up 2.4 percent of the population of Sheldon—and they all played music. Mary’s maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both drummers in New Orleans jazz bands. Her great-grandfather, Lloyd Cambre, Sr., was also a honky tonk piano player. Her grandfather, Lloyd Cambre, Jr., played drums with renowned New Orleans pianist Ronnie Kole and had also performed with Bing Crosby’s son, Gary. Both of her maternal grandparents had been music majors in school, and her grandfather was a band director in Hammond, Louisiana.
The Meyer kids grew up in a homeschool environment and they all learned how to play music. For the majority of that time, the focus around the Meyer home was on classical and choir music. Some of the kids learned brass instruments, and one brother learned to play the violin. Mary’s first instrument was cello. Mary and her mother, who played multiple instruments, took Suzuki cello lessons together. Mary said, “I loved that. It was so fun! When I got home from the lesson, I would pick out the melody with the chords on the piano from what I learned on the cello. Piano just kind of came naturally to me. I always felt at home on that instrument and could always find whatever I wanted to hear on the piano.” Mary also took Suzuki method piano lessons from a young age.
Mary said that her family was raised Christian conservative and any secular music that they were exposed to was classical. She said, “We grew up listening to a lot of classical music and choir music. That was all we were allowed to listen to at the time. My mom really didn’t want drums in the house, even though her dad was an amazing jazz drummer down in New Orleans, I think, partially due to ten children making enough noise. Mom wanted to instill a love for the beauty of harmony and melody. She felt like beautiful and inspired music—healthy secular music—was good for the brain. And I say that out of full admiration for my mother and what she thought to be the best thing to do.” Mary remembered, “I probably didn’t hear my first country song until I was thirteen, and I didn’t know who the Beatles were until I was eighteen. I hadn’t even heard that they were a band. I was just not hip to pop culture in any way.”
Although Mary did not have any exposure to popular country or rock music at a young age, her older brother John was given a banjo that their mother had picked up at a yard sale when Mary was nine or ten, and he started taking bluegrass banjo lessons. Another brother, David, started to learn the guitar, and younger brother, Jim, picked up the bass. In order to fit in with the band, Mary took up the mandolin. She said, “I wanted to be part of the fun, so I said, ‘If you guys get a mandolin, I’ll learn it.’” Mary’s father played the guitar, and she said she recalls a story about him playing a song for her mother when he proposed to her. She said, “Dad played guitar around the house.”
The Meyer Band
By the time Mary was twelve (2008), the band—calling themselves The Meyer Band—started playing local gigs. Not long after that, in 2009, they won the Silver Dollar City Youth in Bluegrass Band Competition. When Mary was fourteen she won the Arkansas State Mandolin Championship (2010) with Jed Clark backing her up. In 2013, The Meyer Band won the SPBGMA Band Contest in Nashville and, as a result, the band started touring nationally. Mary said, “When we won the SPBGMA contest, we were all still teenagers. John was 19, David 17, I was 15, and Jimmy was 13.” The four members of The Meyer Band were the middle children of the Meyer clan (numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7). When the youngest Meyer child (number 10) was born, the oldest was 19. In 2014, the four members of the family band moved to Nashville with their parents and three of their other siblings.
When asked about how the family went about learning to play bluegrass, Mary explained that there was a teacher named Larry Smith who worked at a store called Village Music in Stockton, Missouri (about a half-hour drive from Sheldon). Smith gave the Meyer kids band lessons, teaching them the structure of bluegrass, how to play off the song melodies, how to use band dynamics, how to split breaks, and all of the various rudiments of being a bluegrass band. He also helped them build their song repertoire. For the most part, the band played traditional bluegrass.
Mary said, “Larry Smith was such a champion of us—so sweet and kind and patient with all of our little stubborn ways. He was amazing.” Mary said that the first song she learned how to pick on the mandolin was “Fire On The Mountain.”
When asked about her influences on mandolin, Mary said that she listened to Wayne Benson, Adam Steffey, Sierra Hull, Chris Thile, Danny Roberts, and a mandolin player from Arkansas named Sam Cobb. She said, “Sierra Hull really inspired me. I was probably twelve when I started watching her videos and I wore out those AcuTab DVDs from Wayne Benson and Adam Steffey. I’m pretty self-taught on mandolin, other than my brother John saying, ‘You’ve got to hit that thing! You’ve got to chop like you mean it!’ I had to imagine that I had Adam Steffey’s arm, and I was a lumberjack and could hit that thing. Between John and the lessons with Larry Smith and YouTube and AcuTab videos, it was up to me as far as how far I wanted to go.”
Although Mary started out playing mandolin in the band, she eventually learned how to play all of the instruments. She said, “I liked goofing around on my brother’s instruments. We didn’t have a television, so we played outside and we played music. I love being a beginner at something. It is a challenge and a humbling experience picking up a new instrument when you are already proficient on another one. Once you start to get the hang of the new instrument, where the notes are, and how to translate your brain through your fingers onto a new instrument, there is nothing like that feeling. It is so satisfying.” Mary finally got her own fiddle in 2020 and stopped borrowing her brother’s. She got her first electric guitar in 2021.
Life After the Meyer Band
By about 2015, the members of the Meyer Band were ready to go their separate ways. Their parents and everyone in the family except for John and Mary moved back to Missouri. Mary said, “I actually tried to move back to Missouri, but as soon as we pulled up there, I said, ‘I can’t live here. I have to go back to Nashville and see what is out there for me.’” John had started playing with the Clay Hess Band in about 2014 and played with the Band of Ruhks in 2015. He later also toured with the Jimmy Fortune Band and then, in 2023, he began collaborating with longtime family friend Mo Pitney (see Bluegrass Unlimited, April 2025 cover story).
Mary said that when the band dispersed, she was ready to step out and play more than just traditional bluegrass. She wanted to meet musicians that were her age and writing their own material. She said, “We weren’t really writing our own songs and I didn’t feel like I had much to offer bluegrass at the time other than playing covers of the Album Band songs. Honestly, I got a little bored just doing that all of the time and I wanted to get into writing my own music and find other people my age who were writing their own music.”
After the family band began to dissolve, Mary performed with the Harper Family for about a year and also started playing on some sessions in Nashville. In 2019, she began performing with siblings Theo and Brenna McMillan. Brenna McMillan and Maddie Denton, of East Nash Grass, became two of Mary’s closest friends in Nashville. Mary said, “Mike Bub calls us the Charlie’s Angels of bluegrass.”
After the pandemic, in 2021, Mary got hired to perform with the country band Diamond Rio. She said, “I had two and a half days to learn a 75-minute set that they had been playing the same way for a while. I had about 15 sheets of charts taped down on the stage. But, I pulled it off, and they kept calling me back.” Mary played mandolin and sang in that band. That same year, she also started performing with the bluegrass band Sister Sadie. In 2020, Sister Sadie won both the Entertainer of the Year and Vocal Group of the Year, an award they had won in 2019 and again in 2021. When asked how she got the job with Sister Sadie, Mary said that the band’s guitar player, Jaelee Roberts, knew her and suggested her to the rest of the band. She said, “I had a lot of fun playing with Sister Sadie.”
After leaving Sister Sadie, Mary spent a few years exploring music outside of bluegrass. She embarked on a 2022 Christmas tour with Canadian contemporary Christian artist Matt Maher, who Mary calls “The Catholic Elvis.” She said, “He is a really sweet guy.” For that one-month tour, Mary sang and played lead electric guitar, mandolin, acoustic guitar, and violin. She said, “That was my first gig on electric guitar, and I didn’t realize that I was going to be the lead electric player when I said yes to the job.”
In 2023, Mary toured with country artist Zach Top for a year. In that band, she played acoustic guitar and sang. Like Mary, Zach Top got his start playing bluegrass in a family band called Top String. Mary’s brother, Jimmy, is the bass player in Top’s band, and her brother, David, plays fiddle and piano in the band. When Mary left the band, her brother Jimmy’s wife, Cheyenne Dalton Meyer, took her spot. Mary said, “She is a great fit!”
In 2024, Mary spent time on the road with singer-songwriter Anna Graves. One of the most memorable experiences with that band was opening a show for Stevie Nicks. She also had the opportunity to play at Stagecoach with Lola Kirke and Ben Burgess. In 2024, Mary also spent time playing “one-off” performances with various artists and did some session work.
The Molly Tuttle Job
Mary said that Molly Tuttle gave her a call about being in her new band in January of 2025. She recalls, “I knew that Molly was doing a new album that was a little more Americana/Country. She called, and I was dancing around the house because this was so cool. Because I come from bluegrass, I understand how to play that, but I was also really excited that she was going to be doing more than just bluegrass because I love to be inspired by new music. I was excited to have the chance to do that with someone who is such a wonderful person and is taking her own path. We had a band rehearsal sometime in February with the band that is now out on the road. We got in a room and played about eight songs, and we were like, ‘Well, that works!’ We jelled right away, and everyone in the band is great, and we are having a really good time.”
The band’s first show was on June 6th, 2025. Mary said, “We had a good amount of time between the tryouts and the first show. It made finally getting to the show time kind of like Christmas…‘It is really happening!’ and it is working out better than we could have even hoped. Everybody is bringing their strengths and it is becoming a really cool sound. We are learning how to jell with each other better and play a bit more organically. A couple of people at the show last night said, ‘You guys look like you have been friends for twenty thousand years!’ I thought, ‘That is great! That is the energy that I want to bring.’”
When asked about being the person that Molly selected to help her out with the bluegrass segment of the show, Mary said, “Everyone can hold their own, but it is definitely cool to have those moments. In my mind, it is more fun to play bluegrass than it is to just put it on and listen. I love having that be a part of the show in the middle section. The crowd loves it. I think Molly does a really great job of honoring her bluegrass fans and then also being true to herself and not putting herself in a box. She is following what is true for her and doing what she wants to do as a creative artist.”
Back With Family
Although Mary and The Meyer Band do not perform together as a touring group, she will sometimes still get together with family members and perform, especially with her brother John. She has performed a number of times with John at the Station Inn in Nashville and her brother David has sat in with them a time or two as well.
In addition to occasionally performing with her brothers, Mary said that she and her Meyer Band siblings had the opportunity to go into the studio and record with her grandfather. She said, “We got to record a few songs with him. We never put them out, but we call them ‘The Granddaddy Sessions.’ It is really cute. We had him come up to Nashville and a friend of ours came and set up some mics, and we recorded six or seven songs, just so we could document and get to play with Granddad.” When asked about the songs that they cut, she said, “We played ‘Oh, Lady Be Good’ and my little sister, who plays accordion, did a polka. We did ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’ with my brother on keys. We did some really fun songs and gave him a few drum solos.”
If you are already familiar with Mary Meyer and her music, I don’t have to tell you how talented she is; you already know. If you have yet to hear her perform, I highly recommend that you spend some time online and check out what she is offering. You will hear some really great music and you just might discover a new musical favorite.
