Ferrum, VA · bluegrass

Junior Sisk

1 upcoming festival

Virginia traditionalist with one of the most mournful lead voices in bluegrass, singing hard-luck songs with no ornament at all.

Sisk was born in Arlington but grew up in Franklin County, Virginia, in the town of Ferrum. His father wrote songs and played guitar, his mother sang, and at fourteen he was given an upright bass. He started playing in local bands at sixteen, first on bass and later switching to guitar, and worked through his teens in the family band Dreamin' Creek alongside his father and cousins.

In the early 1990s Sisk wrote songs later recorded by the Lonesome River Band, including "A Game (I Can't Win)" and "Tears Are Blinding Me." Playing bluegrass every Saturday at Partners II, a bar in Centreville, Virginia, he crossed paths with Del McCoury, the Johnson Mountain Boys and the Bluegrass Cardinals.

He joined Wyatt Rice & Santa Cruz in 1995, cutting the album Picture in a Tear, before forming Rambler's Choice in 1998; that lineup released Sounds of the Mountains on Rounder before splitting in 2001. Sisk then worked with Lost and Found and joined Baucom, Bibey and BlueRidge, which toured heavily and made three records before disbanding in 2006. He re-formed Rambler's Choice in 2007.

Since then Rambler's Choice has released Blue Side of the Blue Ridge, Heartaches and Dreams, The Heart of a Song, whose track "A Far Cry From Lester and Earl" climbed the bluegrass charts, The Story of the Day That I Died and The Mountains Are Calling Me Home. In 2013 he also recorded Hall of Fame Bluegrass, a set of duets with banjoist Joe Mullins drawing on rarely covered first- and second-generation material.

Awards have followed the records: IBMA Song of the Year and Album of the Year in 2012, Male Vocalist of the Year in 2013, and Recorded Event of the Year in 2016 for "Longneck Blues" with Ronnie Bowman. Rambler's Choice also won the SPBGMA Bluegrass Band of the Year award in 2013.

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