Shawn Spencer

Atlanta, and a song written to a lawnmower

Before Nashville there was Seven Handle Circus, the Atlanta band Shawn fronted for several years. They climbed the Americana radio chart, got written up in Paste and Guitar World, and opened for Mumford & Sons, Better Than Ezra and the Zac Brown Band.

The song that started it was "Georgia Man," and he wrote it cutting the grass. The mower held a pitch, he harmonized along with it, and by the time the yard was done he had the chorus. He was not releasing anything then. He was handing it to friends at college, and enough of them told him they loved it that he decided he was going to do this for a living.

"The best songs tend to just come all at once when you're doing something random, like driving."

After that band ended he made a solo record, Empty Seas, with the Atlanta producer Billy Hume. It is alternative rock, not bluegrass, and it is where the two of them learned to work together.

A house band with a rolling cast

He moved to Nashville in 2020 to help open Jane's Hideaway, a bluegrass supper club, and the room and the band were conceived together. Greenwood Rye started as the house band, a collective of Nashville players who rotated by whoever was free that night. He booked the rest of the venue's music too. The main cast now is David Freeman on mandolin, Taylor Shuck on banjo, Ruth Shumway on fiddle and Andy Brown on upright bass.

The job he set the band was translation, not preservation. The Station Inn holds down the tradition. Greenwood Rye goes and gets the people who only know they like something about this music.

"If whatever someone likes, there's a reason for it. There's something good about it. There's something that they connected with."

So a night runs from old classics to Beatles songs, and the tribute shows are bluegrass tributes to Motown, to the '90s, to Paul Simon. He is not interested in policing where bluegrass stops.

"It's just a word. Do we really need to argue over the definition of the word?"

The band's most watched video is still a bluegrass "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," filmed around the bar at Jane's on a closed afternoon. The comments kept asking where to get the track. That is the only reason it was ever released.

Hideaway

Nine songs, all original, out August 23, 2024, produced, engineered and mixed by Billy Hume, who also made the Infamous Stringdusters' Silver Sky and their Grammy-winning Laws of Gravity.

"Down to the River" opens it, written in the car on the Monteagle grade during the year Shawn was living in both cities. It sounds like a gospel number and is not. It is a man cheerfully expecting to be forgiven for everything, written as an answer to "Old Home Place," where nobody ever asks the girl for her side of it. "Take My Pride" came from a straighter question: what would it sound like if Mumford & Sons actually tried to write a bluegrass song.

Two tracks are co-writes. "It's Not In My Blood" was written with Frank Evans, a banjo player who has subbed with Greenwood Rye plenty and spent years in the Slocan Ramblers. The closer, "Southern Pines," was written with Mason Via, formerly of Old Crow Medicine Show, at Mason's place out in Old Hickory. It was the hardest one. They moved it between time signatures, chased an idea about red dirt, and came away with two versions before Shawn took it home and assembled the one on the album.

"Both people have good ideas, and then it ends up creating something that couldn't have been created without the tension."

The journal and the melody

He keeps two piles. Melodies go into a recorder app, usually sung as gibberish. Lines and ideas go into a journal on his phone. Writing is the work of pairing one to the other, then spilling it out as prose before it becomes verses. "Winding Road," a song about love as a journey rather than a destination, started as a journal entry called "Kudzu Love," left over from the Georgia summer camps where he runs the music. He wrote those camps a song of their own, "Where the Kudzu Grows."

"Hard Times"

Jane's Hideaway opened in Printer's Alley and moved across town to East Nashville in 2022. Shawn spent months of long days on the new build and had not touched an instrument in two months. He played that first Friday on the new stage, woke the next morning, and the rest of a song he had carried in the journal for years came out in one go.

"Let's raise a glass and toast now that we're in a position where we can look back on the hard times and say, 'Oh, those were hard times, but let's hope they don't come again.'"

Jane's Hideaway closed in June 2025 after five years. Greenwood Rye kept going, playing Nashville rooms and festivals.

The blacklist on the wall

There was a list on the wall at Jane's of songs the band would not play. "Rocky Top" was on it, and "Wagon Wheel," and "Tennessee Whiskey." Shawn wrote the list himself, which he admitted on the show, mostly so he had something to point at when a table wanted the band to be a jukebox. His rule is really about how the request arrives. Ask for "Man of Constant Sorrow" by its title and you have a decent chance. Ask for that song from the movie and you do not.