Tennessee Bluegrass Band
There’s a devoted bluegrass following on the Plateau – listeners who will happily chase a fiddle line across county lines if the playing is right.
For many of them, the Orchard Sessions at Old Edwards has become the place to be. For the past decade, the series has brought accomplished musicians into an open-air setting at The Farm at Old Edwards, where audiences sit among the orchard rows, the music carrying easily through the trees and into the night.
On Wednesday, May 20, the Tennessee Bluegrass Band returns for their second year.
Their return brings a different kind of anticipation – the kind reserved for a group that has moved quickly from introduction to insistence. These are not casual players passing through.
The lineup reads like a genealogy of the music itself. Fiddler Michael Feagan earned his chops on the road with Bill Monroe and Jerry Reed – not names you drop casually, but careers that represent the very axis around which bluegrass rotates. Banjo player Lincoln Hensley, the band’s founder, became something close to an unofficial apprentice to Sonny Osborne of the Osborne Brothers. Mandolinist Tim Laughlin anchors the front line with hard-won fluency, and brothers Jacob and Josiah Sheffield – guitar and bass – round out the group with layered harmonies that have become one of the band’s most distinctive signatures.
What’s striking is how little they push. The musicianship is obvious but never underlined. A tune opens simply, almost plainly, then begins to turn: the mandolin pressing forward, the fiddle answering back, a vocal line tightening the center. The shifts are subtle but cumulative, and by the time the harmonies lock in, the orchard has already leaned in. Not every number races; not every break aims for applause. There’s a restraint here, an understanding that momentum doesn’t need to be forced.
That sensibility fits Orchard Sessions unusually well. Without the insulation of walls or the blunt force of heavy amplification, the music must hold its shape on its own. It does. Sound travels differently here, less projected than released, and the audience meets it halfway. You notice details you might miss elsewhere: the grain of a voice, the texture of bow on string, the way a rhythm settles into place.
A second appearance feels less like a return than a continuation of a conversation they started last year. The introduction is over. What remains is the more interesting part.
The Orchard Sessions run from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., with a cash bar and complimentary light bites. Tickets are $25 for Old Edwards Inn and Half-Mile Farm Hotel guests, $50 for the public. The event is 21 and over. Secure your seats at OldEdwardsHospitality.com/OrchardSessions.
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