A few days after he moved to Nashville in 2020 to make a future as a banjo player (as one does), Canada’s Frank Evans found himself hanging out with fellow musicians on the banks of the Cumberland River in Madison, where he’d just moved into his first Music City home. Along comes a couple in a speedboat, looking like movie stars. And when they slow down and putter over, Evans realizes that it’s bluegrass music’s hottest couple, multi-award-winning fiddlers and singers Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and Jason Carter.
“It was my first time meeting Jason,” Evans recalls about his arrival.. “And I realized that wow, my favorite musicians are just (here)…you can see them going about their daily activities. And then also another realization was like, whoa, a fiddle player can own a fancy boat. I never knew that was a possibility!”
Fast forward a bit, and Frank Evans has been hired by both of them, including supporting Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on tour, on the Grand Ole Opry, and on TV’s The Caverns Sessions.
To be sure, Evans’s reputation preceded him. He was winning banjo contests as a teenager, and from about 2010 until this year, he was a (founding) member of Toronto-based band the Slocan Ramblers (they continue on with Bryan McDowell on banjo and fiddle). In his Music City years, Frank has contributed live or on record to the music of Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Guthrie Trapp, George Jackson, and others. If he’s not on the road, he’s generally on stage locally at one of Nashville's many venues now featuring bluegrass or old-time music. A skilled practitioner of both Scruggs-style, three finger banjo and the older clawhammer style, 34-year-old Frank Evans is as in-demand as any string band picker I can think of.
Now, six years after settling here, Evans is taking an important step on his own behalf by releasing his first solo album, Fit For A Dog, this Friday. He showcases it tonight at the Station Inn, with very nearly the band that tracked the recording: Mike Bub on bass, Justin Moses on dobro, Shad Cobb on fiddle, and Jake Stargel on guitar. Where Casey Campbell played mandolin on the record, the show will feature Tristan Scroggins. For any bluegrass lovers who feel like they missed some golden age when the Nashville Bluegrass Band and Peter Rowan and Bela Fleck played that hallowed room, this is the kind of show and musicianship that stands proudly in their lineage and indicates that we are still the global epicenter for this mighty and malleable music.
“Nashville is incredibly fortunate that Frank Evans chose to call this city home,” says mandolin player and Bluegrass Nashville show promoter Jeff Burke. “Whether playing clawhammer or three-finger style, his banjo work places him among the finest in the business, and as a person, he’s stellar. And while Frank has released albums with The Slocan Ramblers and a few collaborative projects, I’m thrilled to see what his solo album debut is going to have in store for the bluegrass world.”
When I asked Evans in a recent conversation (audio above) if this album started with his departure from his successful band, he said it goes back farther. “It sort of started with that, but it also started with me moving to Nashville and being amongst some of these players I've been listening to my whole life,” he said. “And being able to become close friends with some of them, and being able to have musical experiences with them. And I figured, you know, if I ever moved away, I would like some sort of glimpse into this part of my life.”
Choosing songs was the core challenge and opportunity, he told me. Besides two of his own instrumentals - the breezy bluegrass “Cecil Blue” and the transfixing old-time tune “Pierce Road Waterline” - he focused on looking for cool songs to interpret as an arranger and vocalist. Evans shines from the first cut, a 1970 Roger Miller song about a working man’s funeral called “TJ’s Last Ride.” That sets a tone of surfacing interesting deep cuts from country music that haven’t necessarily been recorded in a grassy way before, including Claude Boone’s “Down Where The Wildflowers Grow,” a Bob Fry rockabilly tune called “Ain’t No Way,” and Conway Twitty’s 1972 ode to temptation “I’ll Never Make It Home.”
The hope is to maybe have one of his versions of these obscurities become popular at bluegrass jams down the road. “Like if they can transcend just being on that album, and then you hear someone playing a song off that record, that's like the ultimate compliment for me,” Evans says. “I was hoping at least one or two of these songs would maybe float into the ether of the bluegrass world to hear them through other people and the way that they interpret them. That was kind of the mission statement with picking the material.”
Evans came to a life in music pretty naturally, as his parents are both professional classical musicians. But he found his own path when, before the age of ten, he saw a live banjo player and was, like many before him, completely hooked by its unique sound. That player, who became his teacher, was Toronto’s famous Chris Coole, part of the brilliant neo-traditional Lonesome Ace Stringband. Besides lessons, Coole encouraged Frank to attend old-time festivals, including the West Virginia gathering commonly called Clifftop, where Frank won the banjo contest by age 15.
That was all playing old-time clawhammer style banjo, but along the way, Frank added the rolling bluegrass style, and that’s what made the Slocan Ramblers so versatile - the freedom to supercharge and blend both traditions. They got going at a weekly bar residency in Toronto and then when they hit the road, they were pleased to discover they could come back with at least enough money to live on. The band released four albums with Evans between 2012 and 2022, winning the IBMA’s Momentum Award for Band of the Year and Ensemble of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2023.
As he got ready to take the stage as a leader instead of a sideman, Evans reflected that he made the right call moving to Music City. He lives in Madison with his partner Amy Alvey, an accomplished fiddler and singer and co-host of WMOT’s Old Fashioned (which I also host). He’s part of a genuine community where skills and good nature are prized and promoted and part of a musical heritage that ties right back to the moment Bill Monroe introduced a young Earl Scruggs - Nashville’s hottest new banjo player - to the Grand Ole Opry audience in 1945.
“That sort of excitement is still there,” Evans says. “There's really nothing like it in terms of bluegrass musicianship.” Hs says his goal with the record is to “put the listener in my shoes for a little bit…There've been some times where I've just been able to be at a jam session in someone's living room, and it's just sort of like the best music I've ever been a part of.”
