Palo Alto, CA · bluegrass · indie · folk · americana

Molly Tuttle

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Two-time IBMA guitar player of the year — flatpicking virtuosity fronting new-school bluegrass.

Molly Tuttle was born in Santa Clara, California, in 1993 and raised in Palo Alto, where she began playing guitar at eight. Her father, bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and teacher Jack Tuttle, had her onstage with him by age eleven, and at fifteen she joined the family band The Tuttles with AJ Lee, alongside her siblings Sullivan on guitar and Michael on mandolin.

She studied at Berklee College of Music on a merit scholarship, and also received the Foundation for Bluegrass Music's first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship. Tuttle became known for her flatpicking, clawhammer and crosspicking guitar style, technique that made her the first woman named Guitar Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association, an award she won again the following year.

While at Berklee she joined the all-female group the Goodbye Girls, mixing bluegrass with jazz and Swedish folk alongside banjo player Allison de Groot, fiddler Lena Jonsson and bassist Brittany Karlson, and later recorded a duet EP with fiddler John Mailander. In 2018 she performed as part of a bluegrass supergroup alongside Alison Brown, Missy Raines, Sierra Hull and Becky Buller.

Tuttle moved to Nashville in 2015 and released her debut EP, Rise, in 2017 after crowdfunding its recording. She was named the Americana Music Association's Instrumentalist of the Year in 2018, and her album Crooked Tree later won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album along with Album and Song of the Year at the International Bluegrass Music Awards. She has also spoken publicly about living with alopecia.

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