There’s something of Missy Raines in every song she records or performs. Whether she wrote it herself or selected it from another songwriter, she’s lived inside the story and the sound. And she wants you to experience it alongside her.
Love & Trouble, Raines’ latest album with her band Allegheny, offers views from the highest peaks of her native West Virginia and from the deepest hollers of heartbreak. The 10 songs come to life with people, places, and stories that have caught her heart during her five-decade journey in bluegrass and beyond.
“Who I am,” Raines reflects, “is because of what I've been through, what I've seen and experienced, what I've loved, what I've been moved by.”
As a kid, Raines often traveled with her family to festivals in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the beating heart of bluegrass in the 1960s and 70s. She’d dabbled in piano and guitar, but when her father bought a bass for himself when she was 10, she picked it up and never let it go. (The same bass is still her primary instrument now.) She started performing as a young teenager, and since then she’s played with some of the greats across several generations: Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Eddie Adcock, Bobby Osborne, Alison Brown, Bill Evans, Laurie Lewis, and Claire Lynch, to name a few. In her 40s, she took on the mantle of bandleader, cementing her own legacy in the bluegrass world.
In 1998, she became the first woman to win IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year award, and she’s won that title another nine times since, as well as IBMA awards for collaborative projects with a wide range of her bluegrass peers and a Grammy nomination for her 2018 album, Royal Traveller. Her stature and her sparkle made her a well-received host of the 2024 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards show alongside fellow bassist John Cowan.
Nearly all the songs on Love & Trouble are rooted in some moment along her path, in the people and places and feelings she wants to share with her audience for the kind of connection that lasts.
“Yanceyville Jail” stems from one of Raines’ earliest memories of bluegrass, or at least from the backstory behind it. It was the early 1970s, and she was a kid in the audience at the storied Camp Springs, North Carolina, bluegrass festival. When Jimmy Martin’s set time rolled around, festival promoter Carlton Haney walked onstage and explained that Martin wasn’t going to be performing that evening, though he’d rejoin the festivities the following day. “You’re not going to hear Jimmy sing tonight,” Raines, in a near-perfect mimic of Haney’s North Carolina drawl, recalls him explaining, “because Jimmy’s gonna spend the night in the Yanceyville jail.” The way she’s heard it, there was a backstage scuffle between Martin and Haney before the set. The ground was muddy and tempers were high, ripe conditions for a juicy bit of bluegrass lore. Decades later, Raines has committed the story to song, told from Martin’s imagined perspective: “I’ve been in hard liquor and soft red clay / And I’ve been in some trouble here today / Roll and tumble tooth and nail / I ain’t going to the Yanceyville jail.”