Rainy Miatke

Sadie’s Newest Sister

Photo By Stephen Cannoy

When we featured the powerhouse bluegrass band Sister Sadie on the cover of our June 2021 issue, the band had recently replaced original member Dale Ann Bradley with Jaelee Roberts (see article on page 38).  When Tina Adair left the band she was replaced with Mary Meyer and then the band added Dani Flowers on guitar and vocals.  When Hasee Ciaccio left, she was replaced by Maddie Dalton on bass (see Bluegrass Unlimited, August 2024).  When Mary Meyer left the band, they had a variety of freelance mandolin players fill in—Tristan Scroggins, Ashbey Frank, Seth Taylor and Casey Campbell, to name a few.  Mary Meyer even came back on occasion to fill in while they were searching for a female mandolin player to take her place.  

In May of 2024, Sister Sadie found exactly what they were looking for and welcomed their newest member, Rainy Miatke.  Rainy’s first show with the band served as her audition and it just happened to be at the Grand Ole Opry on the 4th of April, 2024.  And at 21 years of age, she is the newest member, and joins the other younger generation members (Maddie Dalton, 20, and Jaelee Roberts, 23) that will help propel this award winning band into the future.

Background

Rainy started singing with her older sister, Lela, before she learned how to play an instrument.    Her father, Ray, was a fan of bluegrass music and could play the guitar and would accompany his daughters when they sang together.   There was already a mandolin in the house, so at the age of nine Rainy decided that the mandolin was going to be her instrument.  Her dad found a local mandolin player who was also a teacher and she started taking lessons.

When Rainy was about ten years old the family formed a band with Rainy on mandolin, Lela on fiddle and their father on guitar.  At first they played shows in and around their home state of Oregon.  She said, “We are from a very rural area of Oregon in the mountains.  The closest town is Ashland.”  

Later the trio took a few cross-country trips and performed at various venues.  Rainy explained, “I was about ten years old when we took our first road trip.  It was a great way to see the country.  My dad is very confident and spontaneous and has quite a bit of ingenuity.  He had friends across the country who he reached out to for house concerts and he would find other venues.  We would also busk in many towns if we didn’t have a gig.  Sometimes we would just roll into a town and he would find a brewery or restaurant and he would ask if we could play.  I also remember a couple of times when we were busking and someone who had a local business heard us and asked us to play.  We did get some gigs that way.”

Rainy said that the music that the family played together was mostly traditional bluegrass, but early on she and her sister also started writing songs and performing those.   They also played instrumental tunes that either she or her sister were learning at the time.  She credits John Reischman as being an early influence on her mandolin playing and remembers playing some of his music during the set.  She said, “The older we got, the more original music was incorporated.”

In addition to starting to perform at a young age, Rainy credits bluegrass festivals and music camps as being a very important part of her early learning process.  She said, “I went to the Shasta Music Summit for a lot of years.  I was tremendously inspired by the community that I found at those camps.  That was a large contributor to my musical skills and my inspiration.”

When asked if there were certain instructors at the music camps who inspired her, Rainy said, “Dominick Leslie was an instructor for quite a few years when I was younger and he was kind to me and eager to share his knowledge.  Jody Stecher and Mike Compton were also teachers who were very inspirational to me on mandolin. Laurie Lewis taught at a few of those and she was deeply influential to me, as were Tristin and Tashina Clarridge.  Tom Rozum was also a mentor.  He was always willing to play tunes and talk about the instrument.  Keith Little has been another mentor of mine throughout the years and he currently lives in The Green Springs, Oregon, right across the street from my childhood home.”

As Rainy entered her high school years, she and Lela started performing more as a duo.  She said, “We developed some original material together and started to perform local shows as a duo.  I also would play shows with friends who lived in town and other people who were coming through town.  I was fortunate enough to get to play a couple of shows with Laurie Lewis.  I did a whitewater rafting and bluegrass trip with her when I was sixteen and that inspired me to become a raft guide and I did that for a couple of summers and combined that with music.  I stayed mostly in Oregon performing local shows up until the time I left for college.”

Warren Wilson College

When Rainy was ready to start college, in the fall of 2021, she enrolled at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.  She is currently working to finish her final year and is studying music and expressive arts therapy.  She said, “I love the Asheville music scene. I’ve played in several of the ensembles at Warren Wilson.  It is a small school, but the music program is vibrant.  The music department faculty, particularly Kevin Kehrberg and Ben Krakauer, have worked hard to keep bluegrass alive at the college. The college bluegrass ensemble plays at the IBMA event every year and also plays local gigs.  So, I have participated in that throughout my time in college.  I have also played gigs with some of the musicians that I’ve met on campus.”  In addition to playing the mandolin, Rainy also plays guitar, tenor guitar and has started to pick up clawhammer banjo.

For the past couple of years, Rainy has also started teaching at music camps.  She has taught at the West Marin Fiddle Camp for the past two summers and at the Big Sur Fiddle Camp this year.  She has taught mandolin, guitar, singing and songwriting at the camps.  She said, “It has been so much fun and thoroughly full-circle for me because I was a music camp kid growing up and it was the camps that I went to that had an incredibly large impact on the musician that I am today.  I grew up going to the Big Sur Fiddle Camp that I taught at this summer and I had not been back in about eight years.  So, coming back as an instructor has been really fun.  I hope to teach at more camps in the future.”

When teaching mandolin to students, Rainy said that she likes to emphasize getting the basics down before trying to “shred and play fast.”  She said, “I have always been in the camp of striving for depth of tone and developing technique before fast shredding.  I emphasize slowing everything down and looking at tone and technique.  The more hours I spend, the more I realize the importance of technique.  I realized that the stuff that I was told as a kid that I somewhat disregarded is actually important.  But also, it is fun to find out what a student really loves.  I’m not there to teach anybody what I think they should learn, I’m there to help them learn what they want to learn and meet their goals.”

Sister Sadie

I first met Rainy when she and some of her friends from Asheville had traveled to the Kentucky Fiddle Championships in Owensboro, Kentucky in March of 2023.  After meeting her in Kentucky, I started following her on Instagram.  In April of this year, when I saw on her Instagram feed photos of her with Sister Sadie at the Grand Ole Opry, I assumed that maybe she had met the band at a festival and they had heard her play and then asked her to perform with the band.  But, that is not how it happened.   Rainy said, “I had never met any of them before getting a call from Deanie.  I loved their music and I was a fan of the band, but I had never met them.  They were looking around for a new mandolin player and a friend of mine in Nashville had mentioned my name to Deanie.  They looked at some videos on YouTube and were interested in meeting me.   Deanie called me and I happened to be on my way to Nashville to record on a friend’s album over spring break.  So, I was able to go meet up with her in Nashville and play some tunes with her and Dani.  She told me that they had an Opry show coming up in a couple of weeks.  So, that Opry show was my first show with the band and I guess you could say that it was my audition.”

Never having met three of the band members and never having played with the band at all, Rainy’s first experience with them was on stage at the Grand Ole Opry.  She said, “I walked backstage at the Opry and met Gena, Maddie and Jaelee for the first time and we went out on stage and played.  I was really just thrown in there.  I was so happy to learn that they are all so incredibly kind and fun and, obliviously, incredible musicians.  It was really very spontaneous and serendipitous.  It is a night that I will never forget.  I had so much fun and it was a great way to start my time in the band.”  

When asked how she had prepared for that night at the Opry, and the subsequent show in Texas, Rainy said, “After meeting Deanie, I went home and learned as much of their material as I could.  Then, eventually, Deanie sent out the set list for the Opry and I learned those songs.  That first Opry show that I played was a classic country night, so we played some classic country songs, which was really fun and different.”  Although Rainy is a singer, currently she is not in the band’s vocal mix.  She is concentrating on her mandolin playing.  She said, “Eventually it could be that I will be singing.  But right now I’m pretty happy just playing mandolin.”

Being in a band that is as busy as Sister Sadie will be somewhat challenging for Rainy as she is determined to finish her college degree.  She said, “I became an official member of the band in May and I had to leave school halfway through my finals week to go play in Texas with them.  I was officially hired into the band after that show.  Since then, it has been a pretty steady flow of tour dates and it is picking up this fall.”

When asked if her college program is allowing some flexibility in her schedule so that she can continue with the band, Rainy said, “I’m certainly hoping that it will.  I think so because I have some amazing professors and people who are in my corner and want me to succeed.  Because I am primarily studying music and I have a music career, they are understanding of that.  I will have to work hard and I am fully prepared to do so.  When I had to leave during finals week in May, I worked with my professors and was assigned some extra projects to make it all work.  So far, it has been doable and everyone has been pretty understanding.  I’m making it all work.”

Sister Sadie continues to be a strong force in the world of bluegrass music and with young people like Rainy, Jaelee Roberts and Maddie Dalton in the band, we will—no doubt—continue to hear great music and see exciting shows from this group of talented women for many years to come.