Darrell Scott

Kentucky to Nashville

James Darrell Scott was born on August 6, 1959 in London, Kentucky, and grew up in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee and California, in a family band with his father and brothers that later became Wayne Scott and Harlan County. His father Wayne, a laborer and musician, was a Hank Williams fan; Scott has said that is where he got his Hank from. He grew up on 1960s and 1970s AM country and Southern Baptist gospel, and then singer-songwriters, jazz, rock, blues and later bluegrass. He plays guitar, mandolin, banjo and dobro, lives on a farm on the Cumberland Plateau, and his booking agent calls him a five-tool player: he sings, writes, plays, produces and engineers.

In the early 1980s he played in the Mercey Brothers; in 1993 he began session work with Guy Clark. His debut, Aloha from Nashville (JustUs, April 22, 1997), was followed by Family Tree (Sugar Hill, 1999), Real Time with Tim O'Brien (2000), and, from 2003, records on his own Full Light label: Theatre of the Unheard, Live in NC, The Invisible Man (2006), A Crooked Road (2010), and later Couchville Sessions (2016) and Sings the Blues of Hank Williams (2020). His songs have been recorded by the Dixie Chicks ("Heartbreak Town" in 1999 and "Long Time Gone" in 2002, which Beyonce sampled in "Daddy Lessons"), Garth Brooks, Sara Evans, Travis Tritt, Suzy Bogguss, Patty Loveless, Montgomery Gentry, Faith Hill and Kathy Mattea.

Playing and producing

He toured with Steve Earle's Bluegrass Dukes, was part of Robert Plant's Band of Joy in 2010, and formed the Darrell Scott String Band, whose Old Cane Back Rocker came out in August 2023. He has produced records for Guy Clark, the Zac Brown Band, the Steep Canyon Rangers, Susan Werner and Malcolm Holcombe, co-directed the Nashville Chamber Orchestra for two seasons, and hosts an annual songwriting workshop called Songfood. He was National Songwriters Association International songwriter of the year in 2001 and the ASCAP songwriter of the year in 2002, and received the Americana Music Association's lifetime achievement honor on September 10, 2025 at the Ryman; his album with the Scott Brothers, I'll Meet You in a Song, followed that December.