The SteelDrivers

Hmm, that's dance in the kitchen kind of music right there.

We, we were reading into Chris Stapleton's history this morning, and, uh, if you are a fan of his, you know that he started out in a band called The Steeldrivers as the lead singer, uh, very prominent guitarist for that band.

And everybody thought that he left The Steeldrivers to go big, right? Because he blew up after he left the band.

Mm-hmm.

Nope.

And a lot of the folks that I booked were bluegrass artists, were people that I knew from the Augusta Heritage Center from the Bluegrass Week.

They had been instructors, so I was able to bring up people like the Steel Drivers and Mike Compton and Joe Newberry and the Traveling McCurries to this kind of not too huge festival there in southwestern Pennsylvania.

So yeah, I was very involved in that at the time.

So going back to now, the focus is more on you.

It's hard to explain and describe to people, but it's definitely a place I always send people.

So that starts today and goes all the way through Sunday, and it features a ton of musical performance, lots of good artists, Robert Earl Keene, Shane Smith and the Saints, and then a group called Dos Barrachos, which I hadn't heard, which is Kevin Fowler and Roger Krieger together, the Steel Drivers, Tanner Usre, and a ton more artists.

And they kind of have little different things going on, and a lot of it's free.

So just go check it out.

Right.

And, you know, at 2008, we had the SteelDrivers, and at that-

That's crazy

... which is cool, but in itself, but then when you realize in 2008, the SteelDrivers were still, had Chris Stapleton there.

Yeah.

[laughs]

I love him so much.

I've been listening to him ever since he was with the Steel Drivers.

So good.

So anyway, yeah, I was listening to this, which I hadn't heard before.

Mike Henderson passed away in 2023 at the age of 70 from a pulmonary embolism.

He was a Grammy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist who co-founded the bluegrass band The Steel Drivers and was also the songwriting partner to country superstar Chris Stapleton.

Roger Palm passed away in 2024 at the age of 75 from Alzheimer's disease.

He was a Swedish session drummer who was part of the drummers that played on classic ABBA hits like Dancing Queen and Mamma Mia.

And his name is Sean Sullivan.

Sean's engineering and production skills are credited on many important Roots music albums of the past decade, including two Molly Tuttle Grammy Award winners, music by the Del McCurry Band and the Travelin' McCurries, plus Tyler Childers, the Steel Drivers, Michael Cleveland, Andrew Marlin, and more.

Now he does most of his work at a studio north of Goodlettsville, Tennessee called The Tractor Shed.

So I asked if I could come up and he said, sure.

That fateful meeting led to a long run of Sean Sullivan engineering and producing records with David Ferguson at the now-gone Butcher Shop studio in Nashville.

It would paradoxically become one of Music City's great underground rooms and one that routinely produced Grammy-nominated and Grammy-winning recordings.

The Del McCurry Band, Shemeika Copeland, The Devil Makes Three, Ryan Bingham, Della Mae, and The Steel Drivers heard here from their album Bad For You from 2020.

The studio would really earn it street cred when it became the favorite spot for Sturgill Simpson and, in his wake, Tyler Childers.