Abigail Washburn

Abigail Washburn (born in Evanston, Illinois, on 10 November 1977) is an American clawhammer banjo player and singer. She performs and records as a soloist, as well as with old-time band Uncle Earl, as Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet, in the experimental group The Wu Force, and as the duos Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn (with her husband Béla Fleck) and Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn. Washburn says she never set out to be a songwriter or a recording artist. In 2005 when she found herself on stage in a smoke-filled Beijing club playing her banjo and singing old-time Appalachian mountain music in Chinese to a packed house, she was as surprised as anyone. “A daring, definite talent, whose feel for the folk idiom results in moving material. Soulful is the word,” hailed the Wall Street Journal at the time. “On stage, her voice resonated with the power of a seasoned performer and her poetic hill tunes sounded all the more evocative in Chinese.” It was in Tennessee in 2000 that Washburn met KC Groves, one of the founding members of the band Uncle Earl, and she went on to spend five years touring with the band. In 2005, in the midst of touring with Uncle Earl, Washburn released her first solo debut, and bilingual album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, (Nettwerk). At that point Washburn joined cellist, Ben Sollee, in performing her music around the globe. In 2005 Washburn, Sollee and a few friends—Béla Fleck on banjo, Casey Driessen on fiddle- toured China and recorded as Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet. In 2006, the US State Department and the American Center for Educational Exchange requested that the group come back to lead the first official tour of a US band in Tibet. In 2010, Washburn released "City Of Refuge". As a member of The Wu Force, they played their first show together at the Yugong Yishan music club in Beijing in late 2011 and came back together in early 2014. Beginning in August 2013, Washburn began performing and recording as the duo Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn with her husband Béla Fleck. In 2020, Washburn released an album as Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.