Tuttle’s Bluegrass Throwdown

SOhO has secured a bit of a booking coup for the end of the month in Molly Tuttle, the singer-songwriter-guitarist who became the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Awards’ Guitar Player of the Year awards in 2017 and repeated in 2018, when she was also named the Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. After releasing a well-received covers album and EP during the height of the pandemic, Tuttle – who guested on Béla Fleck’s recent bluegrass double disc My Bluegrass Heart – returns to her bluegrass roots with her forthcoming album, Crooked Tree, her debut for Nonesuch. Due out April 1, the record, which sprung from her banjo-playing grandfather and music-teacher father’s bluegrass, was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Douglas, Billy Strings, Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Dan Tyminski, and Gillian Welch. Crooked Tree has already been cited as one of the most anticipated guitar albums of 2022 by Guitar.com on the strength of pre-release live videos for “She’ll Change” and the title track. Tuttle will be joined by her new band Golden Highway, which features Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass), and Kyle Tuttle (no relation, banjo) for the SOhO show on January 31.