A bluegrass pioneer best known for penning the classic song "Steel Rails," Louisa Branscomb has built an impressive career as a songwriter, singer, teacher, and multi-instrumentalist since the '70s. One of the earliest banjo-playing frontwomen in bluegrass music, she led the band Boot Hill throughout the '70s before maintaining dual careers as a psychologist with a focus on teaching creativity and an in-demand songwriter whose songs have been widely recorded. Since Alison Krauss and John Denver made "Steel Rails" a Grammy-winning hit in the '90s, Branscomb has released several of her own albums, collaborated with countless artists in folk, bluegrass, and roots music, and founded a popular songwriting retreat at her farm in Georgia. A member of the Alabama Bluegrass Hall of Fame and the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame, she has taught at countless festivals and workshops, mentoring other writers. A pair of albums on Compass Records, 2011's I'll Take Love and 2019's Gonna Love Anyway, saw Branscomb teaming up with both her contemporaries and her many admirers from Krauss and Dale Ann Bradley to Alison Brown and Sierra Hull. Growing up in Alabama, Branscomb showed a natural inclination for writing and playing music at a young age. She could create her own melodies on the piano by the age of four and within a couple of years she began writing her first songs. When she was 11, one of her songs was entered in a local contest and she won the opportunity to perform it at the civic auditorium backed by the Birmingham Symphony. By the time Branscomb attended college, she'd already written heaps of original songs and added the banjo to her growing list of instrumental skills. In 1971, while a faculty member at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, she was singing, playing banjo, and writing most of the songs for the bluegrass group Boot Hill. It was a rarity at that time for a woman to lead such a group and she soon left her faculty job and spent the remainder of the 1970s touring and recording with Boot Hill. The group's 1977 LP, Steel Rails, yielded Branscomb's best-known song which had been recorded (but not released) a few years earlier first by Mel Tillis then the McPeak Brothers before Boot Hill even released their version. The band reached their commercial peak at the end of the decade, landing an unlikely hit in Japan with their Blue Ridge Memories album and winning a bluegrass-gospel award for 1979's Fly Soul Away. She also played in another band called Cherokee Rose with bassist and singer Frances Mooney, who would later go on to record a number of Branscomb's songs with her band Fontanna Sunset. Following Boot Hill's breakup in 1980, Branscomb spent much of the next decade writing, teaching, and focusing on her career as a psychologist. She briefly formed the group Gypsy Heart and wrote all of the songs on their lone 1986 release. In 1990, her songwriting career received a major boost when Alison Krauss recorded "Steel Rails" on her Grammy-winning album I've Got That Old Feeling. The song served as a breakout single for Krauss and became Branscomb's first composition to reach the Billboard charts. Since Krauss' rendition, the song has become somewhat of a standard in the bluegrass world and has been recorded by numerous artists, including John Denver on his final album, All Aboard!, which also won a Grammy in 1998. Branscomb made her own solo debut in 1992 with Time to Write a Song and around that same time founded the annual Woodsong Farm Songwriter Retreat at her farm in North Georgia. Another solo release, Fool's Gold, arrived in 2001 and in addition to her regular performing schedule, she continued to mentor younger songwriters and musicians through various festivals, private workshops, and chairing the IBMA Bluegrass Songwriter Committee, which she helped found. Her songs continued to be recorded by other acts including Dale Ann Bradley, the Daughters of Bluegrass, and Fontanna Sunset. In 2011, Branscomb released the collaborative I'll Take Love album which featured her songs sung by a variety of guests including Claire Lynch, the Whites, and Krauss. Released by Compass Records, it marked her first internationally distributed album. Two years later, she landed another bluegrass hit with "Dear Sister," a song she co-wrote with Claire Lynch. The title track of Lynch's 2013 album, the song won the IMBA award for Song of the Year. Similar to her 2011 outing, the 2019 release Gonna Love Anyway saw Branscomb again uniting a host of guest artists to sing and play her material, and included a new version of "Steel Rails" backed by Tina Blair, Alison Brown, Becky Buller, and more. ~ Timothy Monger, Rovi

Louisa Branscomb

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