Nothin’ Fancy
Celebrates 30 Years In the Bluegrass World
Hailing from the fertile musical grounds of Virginia, the bluegrass band Nothin’ Fancy has kept a steady roll in a hard and volatile business by putting the music and the fans first. Now, in 2024, the band is celebrating its 30th anniversary as a group, which is an impressive accomplishment in the ever-changing bluegrass world.
The group has featured 15 members over the years, with mandolinist Mike Andes being the common thread as the musician that has been in the lineup since day one. Fiddler Chris Sexton comes in a close second, having been with the band since 1998.
The creation story of Nothin’ Fancy can be traced back to when Mike Andes first played bluegrass in public when he was 13 years old. “I had uncles and two brothers that played music in various local bands in Timberville, Virginia, which is slightly north of Harrisonburg,” said Andes. “I grew up in an age where we didn’t have social media or internet and my parents did not travel very far to bluegrass shows, so I didn’t get to utilize all of the things that kids use these days. A lot of what I saw of the top bluegrass bands was on television, including on the Arthur Smith show and the little bluegrass that was on the various country music shows. I loved classic country and briefly batted around a little dream of playing that kind of music. But, luckily, bluegrass was always right there, close by, as that music was pretty big where I lived, and that is what I chose to play.”
Eventually, as Andes’s vocals and mandolin chops rose to a higher level, he began to play out, doing real shows with paying bands. “The first band that I played with in the early 1980s was called Jim Orange and the Orange Blossoms out of Waynesboro,” said Andes. “Jim Orange was known as a traditional bluegrass guy and we played a lot of cool festivals together back then. That was my first experience as a semi-professional musician. At the first show I played with him, he handed me a $50 bill and I thought I had made it to the big time.”
Andes grew up in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the I-81 corridor, which is a couple of hours from Washington D.C. Because of that location, he was heavily influenced by the legendary bands that came out of that D.C.-Baltimore scene. “I was always a fan of the more modern bluegrass of that area, so I loved Charlie Waller and the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene as well as bands like Hot Rize and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver,” said Andes. “I highly respect the music of the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe and others, but I have to be honest as back then, I was more of a fan of Charlie Waller and the Seldom Scene.”
In 1994, the group that Andes was playing with at the time was beginning to make some strides on the bluegrass landscape. One day, push came to shove and the troupe had to come up with an official band name that all were happy with moving forward. “We were in Crimora, Virginia, which is the birthplace of Mac Wiseman, and they used to have a contest there called the Country Music championship and the event had a bluegrass category,” said Andes. “We had been knocking around then, playing at some parties and things, and we decided to enter that contest as just five guys having a good time. When we walked up to enter the competition, the lady asked, ‘What is the name of your band?’ My band mate Mitchell Davis turned around and looked at me and the other guys and said, ‘I guess you can call us Nothin’ Fancy.’ We won the contest and we had to stick with the name because the cat was now out of the bag, so to speak. It has been a good name for us, but it literally came about while standing in line at the contest.”
The original members of Nothin’ Fancy included Andes on mandolin and vocals, Mitchell Davis on the banjo, Guy Carawan on the fiddle, Gary Faris on the guitar and Tony Shorter on bass. By the time Nothin’ Fancy began to take off as a band, Andes had some real-life decisions to make as he wanted to play music for a living, yet his well-established day job was hard to give up.
“When I was 21, I worked at Merillat Industries in Mt. Jackson, Virginia, and it was a kitchen cabinet manufacturing company, and I was married at the time” said Andes. “I was in charge of the tooling at this job and if they had to work on a Saturday and something broke, I had to go in and deal with it. Meanwhile, Nothin’ Fancy was going strong and our goals as a group were to take it as far as it would go. It wasn’t about just wanting to play music together. All of the guys in the band wanted to do it as a business, as their profession. So, it got to the point where there was no way I could hold down a steady job, even if I did have five weeks of paid vacation, because we were traveling all of the time and I was using up all of my vacation days, anyway.”
Saying goodbye to a day job, however, is rarely easy for an artist who wants to take that next leap of faith. “Quitting my day job did free me, though, because when I stepped outside and realized what I had done, I didn’t miss the money,” said Andes. “An uncle of mine once told me, ‘You live by your means.’ Yeah, I took a pay cut to come out and play music, but I didn’t miss it because it also meant that I was doing what I was put here on earth to do. As much as I enjoyed woodworking and I enjoyed tooling, as much as I loved working there at the factory and I loved those people, music was definitely what I was put here to do. It is a God-given talent as I’ve never had a music lesson in my life. So, the music part came easy, and I don’t take that for granted, and I give thanks for it every day. But, I have had to work for everything else in my life. Now, I am blessed because my wife Becky has a good job here where we live in Ohio, and she loves music, especially independent music, and she loves bluegrass and she is very supportive of what I do.”
The current lineup of Nothin’ Fancy features Andes on mandolin, Sexton on the fiddle, Jacob Flick on the banjo, Jenkins on the bass and Curt Gausman on the guitar. The alumni of other musicians who have added to the band’s sound over the years include Eli Johnston, Justin Tomlin, Jesse Smathers, Caleb Cox, James Cox and Jacobe Lauzon.
Andes respects the first generation of bluegrass music, yet he grew up in a time and a region where the more uptown sound of the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area scene ruled the day. “My guitar player, Curt Gausman, is a huge Stanley Brothers fan and he loves that era of music, and he has known right from the start that it wasn’t my cup of tea and he doesn’t try to force it on me,” said Andes. “So, I don’t mind if he wants to do a song during our show by Flatt and Scruggs or the Stanley Brothers. But, I’m not going to change the style of my band just to play that style of music. I believe that over the last 30 years, Nothin’ Fancy has developed its own sound. We can take a rock song and make it work. We can take a country song and make it work, and we can take a traditional bluegrass song and make it work. But, the main thing that we have made work over the last three decades is playing our own original music.”
With Andes’s love of the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene firmly established, it meant a lot to him to be able to meet the legends who played in those bands and to do so as a fellow bluegrass performer. “I did get to meet John Duffey, but I never got to befriend him, although he knew of me and I obviously knew of him,” said Andes. “John could be a very nervous-acting type of guy and I was kind of intimidated by him. Sometimes, when I would see him onstage, he could be a bit gruff and totally honest with the sound crew, for example, especially if they didn’t have the sound right. He would stop in the middle of a song and say, ‘We’re not going to finish this until they get that feedback stopped.’ John didn’t take no guff. So here I am, this little, skinny, red-headed mandolin player, and I just didn’t feel comfortable walking up and saying, ‘Hey Mr. Duffey, how are you doing today?’ Later on, I did shake his hand and got to meet him, but we didn’t have any sit-down conversations. Then again, John passed away too soon, and I could have easily befriended him down the road if he had lived longer.”
With Andes’s musical hero Charlie Waller, however, it was a different relationship. “Now, with Charlie Waller, he and I became really good friends and I used to go over to his house and hang out with him,” said Andes. “Charlie was a big fan of our band. He gave Nothin’ Fancy probably one of the best compliments that we have ever received. He was onstage at a festival in Virginia and I was at our CD table and my banjo player nudged me and said, ‘Hey, Charlie is talking about us,’ and our jaws just dropped when, after he and his band came on after us, he told the audience, ‘Nothin’ Fancy is what the Country Gentlemen used to be.’ I cherish that and carry that with me all of the time because knowing that it came from Charlie, I felt like we had made our mark.”
Years earlier, they first got to know each other thanks to a song that Andes wrote which caught Waller’s ear. “Charlie Waller actually recorded a song that I wrote called ‘Heaven Got An Angel,’ and I was thrilled,” said Andes. “One year, we were playing in the band contest at the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America (SPBGMA) convention and we played ‘Heaven Got An Angel.’ And, it’s a tearjerker, for sure, with lyrics like, Heaven got an angel that once belonged to me. We came offstage and I was back in the green room, putting my mandolin away, when somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘There are a bunch of people out there that want to talk to you.’ And, yes, there were people who heard the song and wanted to tell me their stories about what had happened to them with the losses in their lives and so on. Then, somebody else came up to me and said, ‘Charlie Waller wants to talk with you out in the lobby.’ At that time, this was before Charlie and I had become friends. He was my idol.”
For a young musician, having one of your heroes ask to speak to you can be both wonderful and intimidating. “I went out into the lobby and there were a bunch of people around Charlie and I worked my way in there and I walked up to him,” said Andes. “Charlie had that deep Texas drawl to his voice, and he said, ‘Did you write that song ‘Heaven Got An Angel?’ I said, ‘Yessir, I did.’ He said, ‘Sing a bar of it to me.’ I was so nervous that my knees were knocking, and I couldn’t think of one word that was in my own song’s lyrics. So, I’m standing there, looking really stupid, and he could tell that I was really nervous, and he looked at me and said, ‘You did write the dang song, didn’t ya?’ When he said that, it broke the ice and the words came to me and I sang a verse and the chorus for him and he said, ‘I’d like to record that song.’ I said, ‘Sir, that would be the biggest honor of my life.’”
A songwriter always hopes that others in the business will appreciate a new composition. But, when one of your all-time-favorite artists wants to record one of your originals, it is a dream come true. There are very few people in this world that get to have that experience.
“From that day on, it wouldn’t make a difference to me if Garth Brooks walked through my front door right now, or Alan Jackson did the same, or if Elvis Presley came up out of the ground, because if they said, ‘Hey Mike, I want to record one of your songs,’ I would not be nervous,” said Andes. “I’ve had this dream of playing music for a living since I was 8 or 9 years old, so when Charlie asked to record my song that day, it was a defining moment in my life.”
Andes is very appreciative of the fact that Nothin’ Fancy’s fiddler Chris Sexton has stuck with the band for 26 years now. “Chris’s dad and I had played in another band together for a while, so I knew Chris as he was growing up,” said Andes. “Chris is actually a classical violinist, yet he also plays bluegrass. He went to the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester, Virginia, and he graduated as first chair classical violinist. When he got into our band, he would play such beautiful riffs, yet he just wasn’t getting the response that he deserved from the audiences. At first, he would stand there and play the fiddle with perfect form like a classical violinist, but when I told him that he should lean into the mic and bend over and wiggle his backside a little bit, the crowd loved it and we created a monster and it all took off.”
Ultimately, the now-patented Nothin’ Fancy way of playing music and relating to audiences is what has kept the band in existence for all of these years. “Charlie Waller appreciated the fact that we weren’t just playing good music, we were also having fun, and that is how we still work today,” said Andes. “I tell the guys in the group, ‘To be an entertaining band, the first people that we have to entertain are each other onstage, because if we are entertaining each other, we will be entertaining the audience as well.’ And, I’ll tell anybody else that is in the music business that if you don’t have a little bit of competition in you, you’re not going to go as far as you could go, in my opinion. When I go onstage, no matter who we follow or who is coming on next, I want us to get just a little bit more crowd response. And, I am sure the other bands want the same thing, and that is what makes for good shows. We always have the mindset of, ‘Let’s go out there and play good music, let’s have fun, and let’s entertain this audience,’ and that has always worked for us.”
One way that Andes adds to the relationship of the band with its audiences is his emcee work. He readily admits that he has “the gift of gab.” “I can read an audience pretty well, and I include them in our show,” said Andes. “If there is someone in the audience that is crocheting while we are playing music, I’ll point them out and say, ‘Hey, when we play a fast song, the faster she crochets, and if we slow it down, she slows down as well. Cool!” All of a sudden, that brings that person into the concert. The emcee aspect has just come naturally to me. It is a gift. I am not intimidated by standing in front of an audience. In fact, I’m more intimidated by a small audience than a large one. More than anything, I am a people person, and I enjoy people. If I am not talking to them, then I enjoy watching them as I don’t think there is a more interesting creature on the earth than a human being.”
Over the years, Andes has also become a luthier, using his woodworking experiences from his youth to create hand-crafted mandolin and fiddles. Andes’s instrument-making business is mostly word-of-mouth, so whenever you see Nothin’ Fancy in concert and you are in the market for a mandolin or fiddle, check the band’s merch table and see if his latest creation is nearby.
Since 2000, Nothin’ Fancy has hosted its own music festival at the beautiful Glen Maury Park located in Buena Vista, Virginia. This year, the festival will take place on September 19, 20 and 21, 2024, when the summer heat has eased a little bit and the fall season is in the air. This year, the Nothin’ Fancy Bluegrass Festival lineup will feature The Lonesome River Band, Rhonda Vincent and The Rage, Tony Jackson, Russell Moore and IIIrd Tyme Out, The Dave Adkins Band, The Larry Stephenson Band, The Junior Sisk Band, Kenny and Amanda Smith, Volume Five, Ralph Stanley II and The Clinch Mountain Boys, Open Highway, Chosen Road, Blue Ridge Thunder and the always excellent emcee work of Sherry Boyd. Robyn Wines is the band’s business manager and the festival director.
More information can be found at www.nothinfancybluegrass.com.
