When you’re walking around the halls of IBMA’s business conference, World of Bluegrass, for good reasons and bad, everything ends up sounding the same. The Earls of Leicester sound just like Flatt & Scruggs. (Thank goodness.) Every single version of “Carolina in the Pines” sounds exactly like Special Consensus. (As they should.) There are pickers born in the 2000s who sound like carbon copies of Frank Wakefield or Don Reno or Wilma Lee Cooper.
But, in the well-intentioned and admirable adoration, emulation, and preservation a homogeneity results. It’s why IBMA jams sound different from SPBGMA jams; why Californian trad bluegrass sounds completely distinct from say, Virginian trad bluegrass these days. Where music happens, ideas cross-pollinate, and we all start sounding like each other, little bit by little bit. It’s a blessing and a curse.
That’s why it’s all the more remarkable when, out of that bluegrass milieu, a singular voice or perspective or sound can pierce through the sameness and rise above. Especially when that sound utilizes exactly the same tools and is built on a similar respect for emulation and preservation. At this year’s IBMA World of Bluegrass in Chattanooga, Red Camel Collective were one such band.
The group – made up of Heather Berry Mabe, Tony Mabe, Curt Love, and Johnathan Dillon – took home the IBMA Award for New Artist of the Year, their first such trophy. While it’s true they’ve only been a band for a few years (they came together first as Junior Sisk’s backing band and he has since encouraged them to take on work, make music, and record albums of their own), each of the Collective’s members are lifelong veterans of the bluegrass scene.
Perhaps that’s why they do sound like themselves and no one else. They know well by now the intricate little details that add up to a unique sonic brand. It’s intuition. They’re able to follow each other and each song wherever they may lead, landing in sometimes surprising or unexpected places. But still, the bones of this band and of their 2025 debut self-titled album are “just” bluegrass. Straight up and down. When you listen, though – or have the pleasure of chatting with any member of Red Camel Collective, like we did speaking to Heather Berry Mabe by phone – you’ll quickly realize this group has much more going on than the same ol’ same ol’.
Y’all sound like bluegrass, straight up and down, but you also sound like yourselves. Your sound has so much personality. You can tell that you’re holding up tradition, but also you’re trying to sound like your own band, your own group. How do you think that you’ve done that? How have you accomplished having a sound that feels within tradition, but also is something that’s all your own?
Heather Berry Mabe: First of all, thank you so much. That is a huge compliment, especially in today’s time. When I was growing up playing – I’ll soon be 38 years old – it was before YouTube and all of that. So I learned from my family members, I learned from my grandpa and my great-grandpa, and then also from the music that I was listening to at the time. Which was everything from ‘90s country to traditional bluegrass. To me, there was no box. I just loved music and it was just about getting as much of it as I could.
I think what influenced me and my husband, as far as having our own sound, I don’t think it was something that we set out to do [intentionally]. Like, “Hey, we’ve got to find a way to sound like ourselves.” I just think that happened organically. And I’m very thankful, because he’s such a recognizable picker, Tony Mabe. My husband is such a recognizable banjo player. You can hear the influences, but he totally sounds like himself. And his singing is the same way.
And, Johnathan, our mandolin player, he has so many influences, too, but he sounds like Johnathan. Nobody else sounds quite like him. I love that. I think on his part, it’s not focusing on trying to sound like anybody, but playing what you love and inspires you.
It’s not really uncommon for backing bands of bluegrass stars to have their own brand, their own shows, their own followings. I’m thinking about Quicksilver becoming their own band more than once or the New South becoming their own band once J.D. Crowe retired. Or how The Infamous Stringdusters got their start.
So could you tell us a little bit about how your relationship with Junior started as a band? And he just announced his eventual retirement at the end of 2027, as well. I’m wondering how y’all are thinking about what the next couple of years mean for you as a group. Is this your chance to springboard into having a full calendar of solo shows by 2028? Is that too far out to be thinking about?
Playing with Junior, I’ll answer that part first. Johnathan Dillon has been there with Junior since he was 18 years old and he is now 31 – or he’ll be 31 in January. So he’s been there for years and years. I’m not exactly sure how those two got hooked up, I can’t exactly remember the story. But for me and Tony, Junior called me in 2018 to sing a duet with him on an album that he was working on. The song is called “Backwards And Forwards.” I was so tickled when he called out of the blue, especially because I knew this is the first song that Junior Sisk & Rambler’s Choice had ever done with a woman. There’s never been a woman on anything [of theirs before]. So I felt really honored to get to be the first one.
A few months later, he called and said that he needed some help. He asked if Tony and I both would be interested in coming to work with him. Again, I was really tickled to get to be the first woman to play with Junior. We were just so thankful to have the work. It was at a time when my husband Tony was losing his vision. And the rest is history!
It was actually Junior’s idea [for us to be our own band], because there are songs that I’ve written and songs that we love, like I was saying, that really sing to us and speak to us and inspire us. We would sit around and jam on those and they don’t exactly fit Junior’s style. It’s two different styles there. But Junior suggested to us that we cut an album so that we would have something to sell at these venues, something to play on the radio, and all of that. He said, “I think it would be really good for you guys to do that.” So we did. Man, you can imagine our amazement at how much this has blown up! When it started as a side venture.
What are you feeling as you stare down a couple more seasons with Junior, but then his eventual retirement? What’s in the cards for Red Camel Collective? Are you looking ahead already?
We’re doing our best. It’s super hard to plan very far ahead. Lord, sometimes it’s hard for me to plan next week. [Laughs] I’ll be honest with you, most of the time I feel like I’m riding by the seat of my pants, as they say. But we are looking to the future and trying to secure bookings for ourselves so that Red Camel can continue on when Junior retires. And Junior, when he says “retire,” I’m sure that he’ll still keep making records and things like that. He’s using the word “retire” here, but he’s not gonna go away completely, because music is in his blood! It’s just like all of us, we’ll never [stop making music.]
We have plans to go as far with Red Camel as we possibly can. Man, if Johnathan Dillon and Curt Love will have me and Tony – I’m sure he feels the same way – if they’ll have us for the rest of forever, we’ll stay with them for the rest of forever! [Laughs] We love making music together. And we are working on a new album right now. As much as I loved the first one, this next one, it’s just beautiful to see the growth. It’s got several songs that I wrote. Of course, we’ve released one single, “In the Mexican Sun,” and it’s getting played on SiriusXM and a lot of bluegrass DJs are playing that one for us. We’ve got a music video that goes along with that, too.
Yes, we premiered the video right here on BGS!
That’s right!
I’m glad you bring up the single, I feel like it’s the perfect sunny, summer vacation song for moving through fall into winter. It reminds me of Jimmy Webb and the way he writes songs and it also reminded me of Dale Ann Bradley’s “Somewhere South of Crazy.” Can you tell us about the story of the single, because I know from the premiere we did that the songwriter has quite the bluegrass pedigree too…
Yeah, absolutely. We reached out to our buddy Malcolm Pulley, who is a banjo player extraordinaire and incredible bluegrass songwriter. He wrote “In the Gravel Yard” for Blue Highway. He wrote “How Many Roads,” several folks have recorded – Tina Adair, Michelle Nixon, and the list goes on. But he’s just such a good writer, so we reached out to him to ask if he had any songs. [We were] expecting traditional bluegrass, something along that line. I had no idea that he had ever written anything like this.
I believe this is right, he was playing with a jazz quintet at the time – I forget the name of the quintet. They had a [woman] lead singer who was so good. Anyway, he sent me this song that was written I guess in the early to mid ‘90s. The way they recorded it together, it sounded like a Hispanic song, I don’t know if you call it a rumba beat or whatever. It was most certainly not bluegrass! But I loved it, man. I loved the melody and the way that lady sang. It was so good.
I thought, “Man, this is just begging for banjo.” I could hear, instead of the four-quarter time that they were doing, like to halftime it and put a bluegrass spin on it. I thought, “This will really work.” I worked on a little demo of it and sent it over to Johnathan and he was like, “Wow, you’re right. I think that is really cool.”
Let’s talk about the IBMA Award you just won. It’s funny to me – and I think it’s funny to everybody – how every year in the New Artist of the Year category at IBMA barely any of the artists are new!
[Laughs] It is like that, ain’t it?
You just made the point, you’ve only been a band for two years. Your debut album just came out in February of this year. So you guys are new in so many ways, but you’re all also lifelong musicians, veterans. Tell me about what it meant to y’all to step on stage and receive that trophy, because these are peer-voted awards. And yeah, maybe you aren’t new, maybe you’ve been doing this for decades, but this is also a “moment” y’all are having as a band.
It’s so hard, because there are so many emotions. Tony and I, we’ve been married for 20 years and we’ve both, even before that, we’ve just been doing this our whole lives. This is all we’ve ever wanted to do is make music. I know and he knows that’s why the good Lord put us here. We know that it’s our purpose in life and it’s our story. As I look around and compare, I see these young people making such great strides and hitting so many marks so early in their careers. Tony and I, while we had some success, throughout the years for some reason we could just never get that momentum going.
When you’re a person who battles anxiety and crippling self-doubt, those types of things can really eat at you. [They] make you question, “Am I capable of this?” I will tell you the truth. I just said earlier, I’m 38 years old. I have never in my life grown in confidence the way that I have in the last two years. Putting together this album, writing these songs, working through the production process, putting ourselves out there as something brand new.
[Getting the award] felt like a confirmation. It felt like, “Yes. This is where you’re supposed to be.” At the end of the day, an award is a glass thing. It’s just a thing. Awards are not what matters, because there are so many incredible artists and musicians who will never be recognized in that way. Does that take away from their value? Absolutely not! On the other hand, it just felt surreal and it felt like a big kiss on the forehead from the good Lord above to me.
As a band, we were just all blown away. We were not expecting it. I know everybody says that, but this is absolutely the truth. [Laughs] In a category with Jason Carter, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, AJ Lee [& Blue Summit], and Wyatt Ellis and all. Man, we absolutely were completely surprised and blown away – and just extremely grateful, because there are folks who work so hard for years and never get that sort of acknowledgement.
I wanna talk about the new album as well, which came out in February. It’s your self-titled debut. Like what we’ve already talked about, it combines traditionalism as well as contemporary sounds. It’s forward-looking.
But what I noticed first is how live it sounds, warm and inviting – like you’re in the room with y’all. It’s really crisp and it’s really clean, but it also sounds like real music. It doesn’t sound like it came out of a can of bluegrass cheese whiz.
[Laughs] I love it.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys accomplished that sound?
For Red Camel Collective, this was our first experience recording together. It was so different from recording with Junior, because the songs and the arrangements are different. I don’t know that we went in with any expectations except to do the very best job that we could. I think those were basically our only expectations.
As far as the sound, we record live. We track live and then we go back and fix and edit. I wish I could answer your question better! … Music is all about feel. Aaron Ramsey said one time, “It’s all about feel, it’s not a science project.” I think that you can strive so hard for perfection that you suck all the soul and all of the life right out of it. There has to be a balance between what we perceive as perfection and the feel and the groove of the music. Because all of the best albums, the ones that I love the most, were all created before autotune! And there are notes in there that would probably end up being tuned today. But they sure didn’t bother me. ‘Cause it’s all about the feel and the vibe.
I’m thankful to work with musicians who recognize that. While they want it to be right, more than anything they want it to have a good groove. We don’t want anything to interrupt that groove, ’cause that’s what makes people wanna get up and dance.
Speaking of sonics, I love how your voice sounds on the record, too. Could you talk a little bit about your vocal process and maybe your inspirations – or who you looked up to as you were developing your own voice as an instrument? I also can’t help but notice you have two vocal powerhouses guesting on the album, Suzanne Cox and Sharon White.
They’re heroes of mine!
Who are the inspirations and heroes that you feel have been infused into your own voice? Or maybe you’ve just done it all yourself?
Lord, no! Uh-uh, absolutely not. [Laughs] The first one that I have to list is Dolly Parton, because she was my earliest influence when I was just a little girl. The first song that I ever sang anywhere was in my grandpa’s church. I sang “Coat of Many Colors” and she was just my hero in every sense of the word, vocally, aesthetically, that she was a songwriter, an actress. I just adored her. I saw her in all these cute little movies like that Christmas movie she made and I just adored her.
Alison Krauss would’ve probably been the next one who came into my purview. Then that album that Alison did with the Cox Family. I was just a kid when that came out and I had never heard anything more beautiful in my life than their voices. They were so angelic. I would put that album on to go to sleep when I was just a little kid. I loved it so much. Suzanne Cox is probably my favorite female vocalist ever. Ever. I love Alison to no end, but there is just something that draws me to [Suzanne]. I call Suzanne Cox the queen of phrasing. Because no matter what it is that she’s singing, she will phrase it exactly the way it should be phrased. She’s a genius and she doesn’t even realize it, because it is so natural to her and it’s not forced. It’s just effortless. It’s just a gift. She just has one of those one-in-a-million voices and I’ll always sing her praises.
Then you mentioned Sharon White. It was so cool to have her come and Suzanne Cox come in and sing on that song, “Last Time I Saw Him.” But the Whites, man, oh my gosh. They were like the it group for harmony backup in the ‘80s and ‘90s country. That’s who everybody sought out, because their voices – it doesn’t matter who they’re singing with – they make whoever they’re singing with sound like a million bucks. And their singing lead, too. Their tone and their delivery is so pure.
That’s what draws me to vocalists. It’s purity. Sometimes with singing you can just hear it’s just put on. That just doesn’t sing to me. It’s a hard thing to describe really, isn’t it? It’s just something in the purity of people’s voices that really draws me in.
Photo Credit: Ed Rode
