Missy Raines is a bass players’ bass player, a singer, songwriter, teacher, sideman, and bandleader.  In addition to the Bass Player awards, she’s received multiple awards from the IBMA for Recorded Event of the Year and Song of the Year.  In 2019, Missy was featured in The Country Music Hall of Fame as part of their American Currents exhibit. 

2026 January 10 - Saturday - 7:30 PM
WV Culture Center Theater
Charleston WV

With her latest album, Highlander, bluegrass/Americana icon Missy Raines takes inventory of where she stands at this current juncture in her storied career — this melodic ode to her native West Virginia, which simultaneously serves as an ideal prism of time and space Raines peers through into the unknowns of tomorrow.

“Making this record and having this band has been sort of a homecoming,” the legendary bassist/vocalist says. “I’m at a point in my life where I’ve been able to look back at what I’ve gone through, what I’ve done, and the path I ultimately wanted to take.”

Throughout her storied career, Raines has garnered some of the biggest accolades in the music industry, including 14 International Bluegrass Music Association honors, with 10 being awarded for “Bass Player of the Year.” Raines’ 2018 release Royal Traveller was also nominated for a Grammy Award for “Best Bluegrass Album” in 2020.

Highlander brings together some of the finest musicians in Nashville and beyond, including country star and fellow West Virginian Kathy Mattea; fiddle virtuosos Michael Cleveland, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Darol Anger and Shad Cobb; renowned bluegrass vocalists Danny Paisley, Dudley Connell and Laurie Lewis; with dobro wizard Rob Ickes and banjo great Alison Brown also making guest appearances.

“I’m embracing bluegrass again, and it’s all been incredibly good for me,” Raines says. “In every sense of the way, I almost can just go back [in my mind] and rely on those intrinsic things I learned as a 15-year-old in a field at a bluegrass festival — tapping into how I felt back then, and how I still feel today about this music.”

With modern-day bluegrass currently experiencing another high-water mark as names like Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull proudly carry the torch of tradition and evolution, Raines finds solidarity in the ongoing growth and progress of the “high, lonesome sound” — this fine line between respect and rebellion that Raines has seamlessly balanced since the beginning.

“I watched that first generation of [bluegrass] people doing all that — creating traditional music, then breaking away from it to do their own thing,” Raines says. “And all of it is still surviving and flourishing. To me, there’s nothing more bluegrass than the act of absolute innovation — and that’s what we’re doing, because that’s what Monroe did from the start.”

GRAMMY® nominated Missy Raines was named 2021 International Bluegrass Music Association Bass Player of the Year, for the 10th time, more than any other bass player in the history of the organization. 

In 1998, Raines became the first woman to win IBMA's Bass Player of the Year award.

Missy’s version of the iconic Flatt & Scruggs “Darlin Pal(s) of Mine” (from Royal Traveller), was named 2019 Instrumental Recording of the Year by the IBMA. 

In 2020, Missy shared IBMA’s Song of the Year award along with co-writers, Becky Buller and Alison Brown for “Chicago Barn Dance”,  a song written specifically for the Chicago-based band.

Royal Traveller, Raines' third album for Compass Records, was nominated for a GRAMMY® for “Best Bluegrass Album”  in 2019.  The album digs deep into Raines' family life and her upbringing in West Virginia.