Josiah Nelson

Contest fiddle, Colorado festivals

Josiah started fiddle at 11. Both of his teachers came out of competition fiddling, Texas style, so that is what they prepared him to do. Bluegrass stayed in the background until relatives took him to the Midwinter festival in Denver. After that it was an obsession. He grew up going to Winfield. An older brother handed him The Infamous Stringdusters, then Punch Brothers and Billy Strings.

The moment he points to happened at Pickin' on the Plains, a festival in Colby, Kansas, that family friends put on. Michael Cleveland and Hunter Berry were both on the bill that day.

"I wanna be able to make my fiddle sound like that."

He came home with Flamekeeper records and Hunter Berry's Wow Baby and wore them out. MilkDrive did the other half of the work. He saw them several times in Colorado and calls them some of his biggest heroes, mostly for what they and the Stringdusters were doing with pedals and acoustic instruments.

East Tennessee

He started college at Colorado State and was not happy there. East Tennessee State had a bluegrass program, so he transferred, and he has been in the region ever since. He had picked up a mandolin in high school. He got serious about it the summer before the move, and more serious once he landed in Johnson City, where he lived with Thomas Cassell. Then Tray Wellington asked him to join his band on mandolin, which settled the question of how much practice was enough.

How he ended up in Mountain Grass Unit

His ETSU professors asked him to put a jam session together for a prospective student who was in town looking at the school. That was Luke Black, whose playing Josiah already knew from clips online. They spent the session on Tony Rice tunes and found their tastes lined up almost exactly. Luke went elsewhere for school. They stayed in touch.

A year or two later Mountain Grass Unit played Asheville, one of their first shows outside Alabama, and Josiah drove down and sat in. A year after that he played a full show with them in Chapel Hill. That was the one where everybody heard the same thing.

The band asked him to play on their record. Then to do the first ten dates of the summer. Two dates in, they asked him to stay for the whole summer. Halfway through the summer, they asked him to join.

The record

The session was for Runnin' From Trouble, cut at Old Crow Medicine Show's Hartland Studio in Nashville. Mike Harris produced it and Morgan Jahnig mixed it. Josiah was not a member of the band yet, and he went in expecting to do what a hired player does, which is whatever the band asks.

"They really wanted me to have my own voice in the music, which I was not necessarily surprised by, but I was very happy with."

He had been sending voice memos ahead of the date with ideas for building out sections, including the fiddle figure on the second break of "Hey Mama." The first thing he pulled up when the band sent the music over was "Cicada Song." The EP came out in September 2024. The band's first full studio album, Appalachian Smoke, followed on Dualtone in August 2026.

Grandpa Joe

He is the oldest in the band by a margin, and the others were still finishing school when he joined. On a long drive to Portland he sat in the back telling road stories past midnight and introduced one of them with a line that stuck.

"Oh, man, y'all ready for another story from Grandpa Joe?"

The band started using it from the stage. Now people call him that at jams.

His first summer with them was 46 dates and more than 50 days of actual playing, counting multi-day festivals. At Renewal in Buena Vista, Colorado, the schedule came apart at the last minute and the band played the main stage twice, including a slot they were never booked for. Somewhere in the middle of that summer the rooms changed. People were turning up knowing the words to songs that had not been released yet.

"I've been playing out professionally for over a decade at this point, and I've never been in a situation where the people know all the words to all the originals."

Teaching, and writing on the wrong instrument

At ETSU he takes private fiddle and mandolin students and leads student ensembles. One is a straight-ahead bluegrass band. One is a duo working through Julian Lage, Chris Eldridge, John Hartford and Billy Strings material. One is Spacegrass, co-taught with Wyatt Rice, built around the jazz side of Tony Rice's playing. He has taught for years. The collegiate part is newer.

He has no pre-show superstitions. New material gets about a week, longer if it is knotty.

"The more ready I am, the less nervous I have the chance to be."

About half of what he writes starts on guitar. Fiddle and mandolin are the instruments he plays most, which is the problem with writing on them.

"If I pick up a guitar, no matter what I do, it sounds fresh to me, because I just don't play it as much."

The first tune he ever wrote began as a chord progression he found on guitar while learning new shapes as a student. The melody came later, on mandolin.