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.
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.
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