You come from a musical family with your father Jack being a bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and instructor and your siblings Sullivan and Michael being musicians themselves by playing the guitar and mandolin respectively. How would you describe this unique upbringing while being immersed in music from the day you were born?
I grew up hearing music around the house all the time and my dad had all these guitars lying around on the couches and on the walls. He would sit down and play me songs whenever I wanted to hear some of my favorites, which were usually these bluegrass songs my dad would sing. When I was really little, around the ages of three or four, I wanted to play the fiddle, and I thought I was going to stick with that. When I was eight, I asked my parents for a guitar because I was interested in trying it out. I played piano, but it didn’t really stick with me.
I’m the oldest out of my siblings, so I was the first out of us to start playing music and it became a fun way of bonding with my dad. Then my brothers wanted to get in on it too, so they started playing music, and when I was probably 12 or so, we started playing little gigs around town. These were at pizza shops, places where we’d open for bluegrass bands coming through the area and stuff like that.
You just mentioned that you’ve been playing guitar since the age of eight and you’re also the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year Award, so how did this come about and what was your reaction to winning when it happened?
It was kind of a surprise and I actually remember where I was when I found out I was nominated. I was back home in California, and it was 2017 or 2018, so I must have been in my early 20s. I was just kind of scrolling through stuff on my phone and I think people were texting me saying “Congratulations!” while I was trying to figure out what happened. I saw that I had been nominated and I was a bit shocked. I had moved to Nashville in 2015, so it was a year or two after that.
I saw someone saying that I was the first woman achieve the nomination, which was really cool as well. I remember thinking how crazy it was that it’s taken this long for a woman to be recognized on the guitar at the Bluegrass Music Awards. Then after that, I was wondering what was actually going to happen at the ceremony and I ended up winning, which was another big surprise. There were a whole lot of questions about being the first woman to win, but I think for me it was just an honor to be up there at all. I grew up going to those award shows and it felt like the biggest thing in the world to me. I got to see my heroes like Tony Rice and Bryan Sutton win the award, so it was really cool to see my name up there with people I really admired and looked up to.
It must have been a great feeling. Over the past few years, you’ve been performing with your own backing band Golden Highway, so how did this come together and what makes this band stand out for you versus other projects you’ve been involved in?
It really started to come together during the pandemic. I wanted to switch things up, go back to my roots and make a bluegrass record. In the bluegrass world, you’ll often see the name of the artist and then their band name, so I thought that it would be fun to differentiate the record from what I’ve done in the past. From there, I put the band together and we’ve been touring ever since. It’s been really fun to step away from the total solo artist thing and really put a spotlight on these amazing musicians that I’ve been performing with on the road.
From: https://medium.com/culture-beat/interview-molly-tuttle-prepares-to-make-her-return-to-freshgrass-with-golden-highway-cba8b962cc7a
