The SteelDrivers Celebrate an Amazing Two Decades of Bluegrass
The story of the rise of The SteelDrivers is an impressive one. What famously started as a one-off bluegrass jam in a living room in Nashville turned into 20 years of great music and accolades at the highest levels of the music world.
I distinctly remember the first time I heard about The SteelDrivers 18 years ago when some friends of mine happened to see them perform live. The band opened up for Marty Raybon in 2007 at a venue called Spicer’s Lake, located 30 minutes outside of Cincinnati. My friends enjoyed Raybon’s set, talking about his whistling and cow-calling yells that he did onstage, and at the same time, they absolutely raved about The SteelDrivers.
The SteelDrivers had signed with Rounder Records yet their debut album would not come out until 2008. Because I had missed the show and because their first recording had yet to see the light of day, it was the enthusiastic word-of-mouth mention of them by friends Paul and Tom Ziegler that put them on my radar. The original lineup of The SteelDrivers included Tammy Rogers, Chris Stapleton, Mike Henderson, Mike Fleming, and Richard Bailey.
By April of 2009, after writing a review of The SteelDrivers’ first album, I was watching the band perform at the MerleFest music festival in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. At that time, the press surrounding them still centered on talking about their earlier individual successes in the music world, discussing the artists they had previously recorded with or written songs for, what country or bluegrass act they toured with in years past, and more. That would all soon change as the gravity of The SteelDrivers’ first two albums put the group firmly in the spotlight. After that, they were no longer a side project as they quickly transitioned into a band that was creating a franchise of its own.
Fast forward 16 years later to April of 2025 and The SteelDrivers are playing MerleFest once again, this time on a Thursday evening. As their set ends, I am amazed at how many people in the large crowd are leaving the Watson Stage area after they are done. That tells me that the audience was there to specifically watch The SteelDrivers perform. With 12 stages at MerleFest, music fans naturally rotate in and out of various stage areas so they can see certain bands, and The Dead South definitely brought their own crowd in an hour or so later. But there is no doubt that at 20 years in, there are many music lovers that still love The SteelDrivers. That was also proven by the length of the line of people waiting to meet the group at the Autograph Tent right after their show.
So, how were things different for The SteelDrivers 16 years ago? To find out, I looked through some of my archives and notes and I amazingly found Stapleton’s old “615” Nashville phone number on one of my lists. I had it because I was lucky enough to interview him twice before he became world famous. The first interview took place when he was still with The SteelDrivers in 2008, and I interviewed him again just a month and a half before his life changed instantly at the CMA Awards in 2015.
The truth is, a lot of people first became aware of Stapleton from his time with The SteelDrivers due to his powerful original songs and unique vocals found on the first two albums the group released, including their self-titled debut album and their sophomore effort called Reckless.
The first album is full of great cuts, from “If It Hadn’t been For Love,” “Heaven Sent,” “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” “Blue Side Of The Mountain,” and “Midnight Train To Memphis.” The vast majority of these songs were co-written by Stapleton and band mate Mike Henderson with other co-writes featured on the project composed by Stapleton with Jerry Salley, Kevin Welch and Liz Hengber.
The Reckless album featured more Stapleton-Henderson-penned collaborations along with “Good Corn Liquor,” co-written by Stapleton and Ronnie Bowman. That recording includes the stunningly moving and poignant song “Where Rainbows Never Die.”
As I did my research for this article, I found my interview with Stapleton from 2008, which was published in the Herald Dispatch newspaper in my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. In it, he talks about his Eastern Kentucky upbringing in Paintsville, and how he got to Nashville.
“A guy named Steve Leslie brought me to town,” said Stapleton. “He was a writer for EMI at the time. I lived in Morehead, Kentucky, then and he went to school there and he was back visiting some professors. Steve happened to run into a buddy of mine, Jessie Wells, and said, ‘Hey, if you know anybody that writes songs, I’d like to help somebody out from around here.’ Jessie was kind enough to give me Steve’s number, and I called him up two or three weeks later and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come down here and hang out a little bit.’ I went back and forth between Kentucky and Nashville for about three months and then decided to move down there. Four days later, I had a publishing deal with Sea Gayle Music, and I’ve been here ever since. That was in October of 2001.”
Oddly enough, Stapleton did not listen to a lot of bluegrass music while growing up in Eastern Kentucky. In fact, it was his previously mentioned friend Jessie Wells that turned him onto the genre. Stapleton tells me that after that exposure, he learned to love the sounds of “Tim O’Brien, the Lonesome River Band, the Stanley Brothers, and John Hartford.” That is a crucial aspect of this story because when Stapleton, Henderson, Bailey, Rogers, and Fleming get together for that fateful first jam, the goal was to get away from country music and to play some bluegrass tunes specifically.
Further into my interview with Stapleton, he talked about this new group that had formed by accident.
“It’s always an absolute treat to get to play with musicians as good as the musicians that I get to be onstage with in this band,” said Stapleton. “If you’ve ever been in bands or tried to be in bands, it’s rare that you get to stand up onstage with people that are going to do something new every night that you didn’t know they were going to do. It’s always a rewarding thing to get up on a stage and listen to them play and sing, especially when I’m staring over at Richard and he’s got a big ole smile on his face. It keeps it fun when we have that kind of a relationship as people and as musicians. It’s a real honor to be up there with them.”
By 2010, however, Stapleton had left The SteelDrivers to work on his solo projects. That path would lead to his album Traveller, which changed the whole landscape of the country genre worldwide and made Stapleton the stadium-filling superstar that he is today.
There were more changes to come for The SteelDrivers as during the following year, Mike Henderson would also leave the band with Brent Truitt brought in to take over the mandolin chair.
With Stapleton and Henderson gone, The SteelDrivers were at a crossroads, yet they decided to move ahead and continue to build their legacy. That is when Rogers, Bailey, Fleming and Truitt stepped up their game. The key to the group moving forward centered on finding a new lead vocalist that could pull off that raspy blue-eyed soul sound that Stapleton took with him.
Amazingly, since then, The SteelDrivers have found three lead singers in a row that brought their powerful vocal abilities to the group, and that list includes Gary Nichols in 2010, Kelvin Damrell in 2018, and the current singer Matt Dame, who came onboard in 2021.
As the group headed down their new path, other high-profile things began to happen to The SteelDrivers in their post-Stapleton period. One of the most popular singers on the planet, Adele, recorded the song “If It Hadn’t Been For Love” for the extended tracks part of her hit album called 21, and a live version of the cut was also included on her concert DVD. Also, after the band recorded several songs for the soundtrack of the movie Get Low, the Oscar-nominated actor and comedian Bill Murray, who was one of the film’s lead actors, fell in love with the group and still visits them to this day. In 2015, The SteelDrivers won a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album for their album The Muscle Shoals Sessions.
Now, to celebrate their 20th anniversary, the SteelDrivers have released their new album called Outrun on May 23, 2025. The new recording can be found on the Sun Records label, which is the familiar and legendary recording imprint started by Sam Phillips in 1952 that was recently purchased and revived by the Gaither Music organization.
For this article, Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine interviewed Tammy Rogers about the full history of the group, and we also talk with lead singer Matt Dame as well, who represents the band’s current flow.
In recent years, Rogers has truly stepped up her songwriting game. Always a top musician in Nashville who has written songs for decades, she is now at the point where she tries to write a song almost every day. With Dame behind the microphone and Bailey, Fleming, and Truitt keeping that unique SteelDrivers sound on track with their arrangements, the group keeps moving forward and the fans are still right there with them.
“I love being known in the music world but not being too famous,” said Rogers. “I can walk down any street in Nashville and not be noticed. But, it always catches me by surprise when someone will find out that I am in the band and they will say, ‘Oh my God, I love The SteelDrivers.’ I still wonder, sometimes, how folks know who we are, but it is a wild situation when that happens. At this year’s MerleFest, for example, we hadn’t played there in a lot of years and I was surprised at the reception we got for our performance, as it was kind of an early set. It was at 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday and I thought the seats would be about half full. But, by the time we finished, the crowd was large and we got a standing ovation and that was very sweet and awesome.”
Once again, as Rogers remembers it, the band started out as a simple jam session in a living room with no one having any inclination of forming a band at that time. To put things in perspective, when everything clicked and the quintet played a few gigs and decided to give this band a try, Rogers’ daughter, whom she shares with her husband and guitarist Jeff King, was only three years old. Now, she is a grown woman out in the world, and that is one big way that Rogers counts the last twenty years.
“When I look at my daughter and realize that she will be 24 years old this fall, it blows my mind,” said Rogers. “I am sure there is not a time when she doesn’t remember her Mom doing these crazy things with music. And, of course, Mike (Henderson) died in 2023. When I look at old pictures now, and we have collected a bunch over the years, I think we are going to try and put together a photo retrospective of the band from the last 20 years that we will show at some of our indoor concerts. When you look at the pictures, suddenly you go, ‘Dang.’ Mike Fleming is completely white-headed now and he had brown hair back at the beginning.”
What has stayed steady for The SteelDrivers over the past two decades, however, is the pursuit of finding good songs, presenting them in high-quality fashion, and sharing them with the world. “I keep going back to this over and over again, but this whole journey has always been about the music,” said Rogers. “It has also been about the people that have continued to support us all of these years as well. Obviously, if people hadn’t come out to see us and bought the tickets and listened to the records, we would not have been able to do this for this long. I have never felt like our fans were not looking forward to new music. What I mean by that is if I ever got the feeling that we were never going to record another album and we were just going to keep playing the same two dozen songs over and over again, ad nauseum, I’d say, ‘Ok, I’m done.’”
If you have ever gone to a show by The SteelDrivers, especially one of their headlining concerts, you will witness the phenomena that every musical group hopes to experience during their lifetime, and that is an engaged audience that loves the songs so much that they know every lyric and they are able to collectively sing them back to the performers on the stage.
“That really started happening to us about eight to ten years ago when I began to notice that people were singing along with us, and not just with the older songs, but with the new ones as well,” said Rogers. “When that starts happening, you know that you have done something good because it usually takes more than a one-time listen for them to get to know the lyrics of a song. It means that they have spent some time with your music. When I see them singing to songs that are newer and not just on the first two records, that is what keeps me moving forward as an artist.”
The sound of The SteelDrivers was always different than the traditional bluegrass template, and yet they fit perfectly within the wider view of the genre. With that in mind, from the beginning, there were many important and established bluegrass artists who championed The SteelDrivers.
“Del McCoury always liked us and often played ‘Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey’ on his once-a-week Sirius/XM radio show,” said Rogers. “Sam Bush also supported us very early on, and to this day, he jokes around and calls us ‘The Piledrivers.’ But again, Sam knew what it was like to do something different that the traditionalists might not like because he did it for years with the New Grass Revival. He knew what we were living through and he was always cool about it saying, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ Another one in our corner was Tim O’Brien. He showed up one night when we were playing at The Station Inn once a month in our early days and in his own unique and dry ‘Tim’ way he said, ‘Well, I think you are going to be good for bluegrass, but I don’t know if bluegrass is going to be good for you,’ (laughs) We thought he was hilarious. Tim is the best.”
With each post-Stapleton lead singer the band has found, it has remotivated The SteelDrivers and kept things fresh. “All of the newer lead singers that have sung with us do have a somewhat similar sound, yet we always tell them, ‘Sing it your way,’” said Rogers. “We tell them to try and not sound like Chris because then it would become a caricature. They all kind of have that bluesy voice and that is good. I remember talking to Ken Irwin one day when we recorded for Rounder Records and he was always supportive of the changes we were making with our lead singers. Ken said, ‘You’re just doing the Ralph Stanley model, where Ralph kept finding all of those lead singers that had that Carter Stanley sound in their voice without imitating Carter.’ I mean, I can tell the difference when I hear Larry Sparks sing or Keith Whitley or Roy Lee Centers, and yet they still had that same overall quality about them.”
To the band’s credit, they struck gold a third time when they found Matt Dame down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Dame, who grew up in a musical family in Batesville, Arkansas, did make the move to Nashville where he took part in some songwriting sessions and was hired to sing on many demos.
“When I grew up in Batesville, my family always loved bluegrass music, and we were not far from Mountain View, Arkansas and that is a very heavy bluegrass town where all of the local pickers gather around in 20 to 30 groups every weekend in the town square and play music,” said Dame. “But, while I have always been around bluegrass, I never thought I’d be performing it. I thought I’d be singing more country music. But, before I worked in the music business full time, after three years of college, I worked on a farm doing animal husbandry and I loved it, although I just didn’t make much money with it and it was a dangerous and dirty job. Then, I became a police officer for about eight years.”
While enjoying a night out, Dame experienced a chance meeting with an old friend that changed the direction of his life. “I was walking down one of the rows at the Arkansas State Fair when I ran into someone I went to high school with who stopped me and asked if I still sang and played the guitar,” said Dame. “When I said yes, he said, ‘I still live in Little Rock but I’m about to move to Nashville. I have been writing poems and some folks there have been helping me with melodies and that is how I am writing songs. Would you want to come and help me with some unfinished songs?’ So, we got together and worked on some songs and then he moved to Nashville pretty quickly after that, even though I was wondering if he would actually do it. He played some of the recordings of songs that we did for folks in Nashville, as well as songs he wrote with other people, and a songwriter he had met at a party listened to his stuff and then asked him, ‘Who is the guy singing here?’”
That encounter led to Dame being hired to sing demos and do radio commercials and more in Nashville, which he did for 20 years. Along the way, he met Rogers and her husband Jeff King while doing studio sessions, but it was just in passing. Eventually, however, the Grammy Award-winning songwriter Gary Baker entered the picture. Baker wrote the 20 million-selling cut “I Swear” and other hits, and one day he formally introduced Dame to Rogers and the connection was made.
By that time, tired of Nashville, Dame had moved to Muscle Shoals in late 2020 to be close to his sister and mother and to do his voice work at his home studio. “In the spring of 2021, Gary Baker calls me and says, ‘Hey, do you know anything about the band called The SteelDrivers?’” said Dame. “I said yes, and then he says, ‘They are good friends of mine and they are having a transition with their lead vocalist and I think your voice and the stage of life that you’re in right now would be perfect for them. Can I give Tammy your number so you can at least talk about it? I’m not promising anything, but it might be a good fit.’ And that is how it happened. Tammy and I talked on the phone about what the gig would be like, and then I went up there to rehearse with the band and they gave me five or six songs to learn. I went up there a second time to rehearse with five or six different songs to learn, and then they wanted to talk about it amongst themselves without me in the room. Then, they called me and said, ‘We’d love to go forward with you, we’d love for you to be the next singer of the group.”
Dame not only sings on the new SteelDrivers album Outrun, he also wrote three of the cuts on the recording. The SteelDrivers are riding the momentum of the new Outrun album with a full slate of live shows that will run until the end of October, which is impressive for a band that has been around this long. The question is; how much longer will the group keep pushing forward?
“I still enjoy it, I still enjoy the music and I still enjoy the shows when we are onstage,” said Rogers. “But, I’m not going to lie and say that the travel part of it is easy, because it’s not. But at the same time, 20 years is a big deal as most bands do not stay together this long. And, here we are with a good new recording and great fans and we are proud of what we have accomplished.”
More information can be found at www.thesteeldrivers.com and sunrecords.com.
