Lucas White

A Texas kid on the bluegrass circuit

Lucas White is from Corsicana, Texas. He started on fiddle at seven and moved to guitar as a teenager. By 15 he had won the Texas State Guitar Championship.

School bent around the music. His district was persuaded that playing bluegrass counted as an education, and he got the latitude to leave in the fall for IBMA week. Summers went to Camp Bluegrass at South Plains College in Levelland and to IBMA's Kids on Bluegrass. The cost was that nobody back home knew what he was doing.

"Everybody knew a Black Eyed Peas song, and they were all dancing to it in lunch or something, and I have no clue what in the world they're even referencing, because I've just been listening to Tony Rice Unit, Mountain Heart."

Tony Rice's phone number

He met Tony Rice in Argyle, Texas, when he was a kid. Rice gave him his phone number.

"He made the mistake of giving me his phone number. I think that was like in October. And so what did I do? Thanksgiving, gave him a call. Christmas, gave him a call. New Year's, gave him a call. Easter, gave him a call."

Rice took the calls, and kept taking them for years. The connection went deeper through Snuffy Smith, the luthier in King, North Carolina, who looked after Rice's 1935 Martin D-28. White spent three days at Smith's place as a young teenager, before he could drive, playing the guitar and helping put it back in order. Rice lived over in Reidsville and would turn up around midnight to see how it was going.

"Here I am pounding frets into the 1935 antique Tony Rice guitar."

Learning the business from the inside

At 14 and 15 the producer and fiddler Jim VanCleve had him out on the road with Mountain Heart. He changed strings, flipped merch and made sure the carts were where they needed to be. Mostly he watched how the machinery worked.

VanCleve has produced Off The Rails from the start. Before the band's first session he played a private show with them, so he would know how they sounded together rather than on paper.

The suit and the guitar

White went to Washington and worked copyright policy on Capitol Hill. He was there for the Music Modernization Act, the 2018 law that made streaming services account to songwriters and publishers, and he has worked on the HITS Act, which would let working artists write off what they spend making records.

"All the societies, when they were coming in, they weren't talking to a suit or a politician. They actually did get to talk to a musician who was in a position of policymaking."

He puts the motive plainly. He was making sure that when he is 70 he still gets paid for the work he is doing now.

Off The Rails

The band came together sideways. Cory Chubb on guitar and lead vocals, Ben Hill on mandolin and Taylor Gerber on bass were all in the Washington area when White moved up for work. Hill, a friend since childhood, pulled him into the jam. A festival offer came through White's contacts, and the group played its first gig at the Red Daisy Festival in March 2023, on Doc Watson's hundredth birthday. Billy Strings and his band played a night of Doc's music that weekend, which left a crowd primed for a jam band and nobody scheduled to be one. Off The Rails did it instead.

They came off that weekend deciding it would not be a side project. Frank Evans on banjo and Cody Bauer on fiddle filled out the six-piece. Since then the band has won band contests at Galax and RockyGrass and put out singles produced by VanCleve: "Coming Home to You," "Ride Forever," written by Mason Via and Charles Humphrey III, and "She Flies," co-written by Jon Weisberger.

Three in the morning at Galax

"Concrete and Steel" started in a campsite at the Old Fiddlers' Convention at three in the morning, when Ben Hill put down the mandolin and picked up a clawhammer banjo. White made everybody stop and asked him to play it again. The instruments were already out, so the band built the tune on the spot.

The next afternoon they played it again in the campground, and a kid and his grandmother walking the aisles stopped and started flatfooting to something that had not existed twelve hours earlier.

"You have two totally different eras of people enjoying one thing together, and we created that."

The tune went on to win the instrumental category at the Walnut Valley NewSong Showcase.

Nashville now

White makes the case that Nashville has taken the progressive bluegrass scene back from Colorado, and he has backed it with work. Approached by a bar in the Nations neighborhood about becoming its house band, he turned the slot down and built the room a weekly Saturday bluegrass night instead.

He leads Nash Grass Unit, a Nashville progressive bluegrass band recording its first album. He has played the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman and shared stages with members of the Tony Rice Unit and with Vince Herman.

"It's awesome that we can feel so euphoric and almost feel like it's a drug, and get to call it bluegrass music."