Tom Adams | Adams County Banjo

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Awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association

Banjo Player of the Year 2002, 1993, 1992
Entertainer of the Year 2001 (with Rhonda Vincent & the Rage)
Album of the Year 1990 (At the Old Schoolhouse, The Johnson Mountain Boys)
Instrumental Album of the Year 2004 (Live at the Ragged Edge, with Michael Cleveland)
Best Liner Notes 2006 (Let 'Er Go Boys, Michael Cleveland)

Tom Adams was born in the town of Gettysburg in Adams County, Pennsylvania. His father played the guitar, mandolin and fiddle. When Tom was nine years old, and his brother Dale was eight, he taught both boys the guitar and mandolin. In less than a year, the trio began performing as "The Adams Brothers & Dad" at hymn sings and other events in the Gettysburg area. In the last few months of 1968, Tom's father borrowed a banjo for the purpose of learning the instrument well enough to perform with it in the group, with the idea that his sons would continue playing guitar and mandolin.

Having expressed no prior interest in the banjo, once one was in their home with which he could experiment, Tom started playing the banjo in January, 1969. Trying to emulate the sounds on Foggy Mountain Banjo and other Flatt & Scruggs albums, Tom learned the tunes Cripple Creek and Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

Starting out on that borrowed 1927 Montgomery Ward banjo, only a few months went by before his father bought him a used Harmony banjo for sixty dollars. After playing the Harmony in a contest (in which he placed fourth) at Berryville, VA in July, 1969 and seeing the other contestants, including Porter Church, playing Gibson banjos, Tom begged his father to get him "a good banjo." Securing a loan from the bank the following month, Tom's father presented him with a new Gibson Mastertone RB-250, the banjo he would play for the next seven years.

The following summer, the group appeared on the CBS television variety show "The Ted Mack Amateur Hour." While he was thrilled to travel to New York, Tom's most cherished memory of 1970 was meeting Earl Scruggs at Sunset Park in West Grove, PA, and watching "Earl Scruggs & His Boys," as they were billed, perform two shows.

Tom continued to hone his skills through the early 1970s, practicing and listening for hours each day to albums by Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, The Country Gentlemen, Jim & Jesse, The Osborne Brothers, and Buck Owens. Within two years, the family band added two family friends to the group and changed the band's name to "The Adams Brothers Show". Appearing on local TV and radio shows, and performing at volunteer firemen's carnivals and local campgrounds, the group had become a fixture on the local music scene by the time it disbanded upon the passing of Tom's father in 1979.

It was around this time that Tom ventured beyond the family band to fill in on banjo for one show with The Bluegrass Cardinals, another with Del McCoury and on several shows with Whetstone Run and Bob Paisley. The next three years found Tom variously working with bluegrass veteran Chris Warner, fronting his own group, "Tom Adams & The Double Eagle Band," and playing with Warren Blair's Baltimore-based "Southland".

In the summer of 1983, Tom joined Jimmy Martin & The Sunny Mountain Boys, and moved to Nashville the following spring. Working with Jimmy "was a real exercise in discipline" and "a great learning experience," according to Tom, whose solid hard-driving style was now being showcased to audiences at festivals throughout the country. Martin was not recording during this period and only a public television broadcast of the 1985 Berkshire Mountains Bluegrass Festival and some audio board tapes from a few other festivals document Tom's tenure as a Sunny Mountain Boy.

Tom joined the neo-traditionalist Johnson Mountain Boys in September, 1986 and two years later recorded what music historians have called "one of the genre's landmark albums," At the Old Schoolhouse, awarded the International Bluegrass Music Association's first "Album of the Year" in 1990. The record was also a finalist for Best Bluegrass Recording at the 32nd Grammy Awards.

During the Johnson Mountain Boys' temporary musical hiatus in 1988-89, Tom joined Lynn Morris and fellow JMB member Marshall Wilborn to launch the Lynn Morris Band. Recording two band albums and his first solo album, Right Hand Man, in the early 90s, Tom toured regularly with Lynn until May 1991, as well as joining Tony Trischka and Tony Furtado for several tours as the Rounder Banjo Extravaganza, from which a live CD was issued in 1992.

Tom returned to the Johnson Mountain Boys in 1991 and remained with them through the band's final performance at Myrtle Beach SC in November, 1996. During this time, the group recorded the Blue Diamond CD, a finalist for Best Bluegrass Album at the 1994 Grammy Awards. From the fall of 1995, Tom was, for one year, also the banjo player for the Lynn Morris Band, appearing on Lynn's third album, Mama's Hand, and juggling the two band's limited touring schedules.

From the onset of his wife's year-long battle with cancer, Tom basically retired from music, making a rare appearance in 1997 with Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder at Bryan, TX. In 1998 Tom joined Blue Highway for a two-year stint, replacing the band's current, and original banjo player, Jason Burleson. Tom and the band recorded the self-titled Blue Highway album for Skaggs Family Records in 1999.

In September, 2000 Tom joined Rhonda Vincent's band, The Rage, for a short-lived but seminal collaboration with fiddler Michael Cleveland that also reunited him with his long-time friend, Audie Blaylock, who had joined Jimmy Martin & The Sunny Mountain Boys on the same day back in 1983. In 2001 Tom released his second solo album, Adams County Banjo, and received the IBMA "Entertainer of the Year" award as a member of The Rage. Additionally, Tom's playing was featured on Rhonda Vincent's The Storm Still Rages and Michael Cleveland's Flamekeeper.

Working briefly with Dale Ann Bradley in 2002 and again in 2003, Tom began to experience difficulty controlling the movement of the middle finger of his right hand. Diagnosed in May, 2003 with focal hand dystonia - a disorder for which there is no known cure - by neurologists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, Tom continues to battle the debilitating effects of this neurological disorder.

Recorded March 12, 2002 just prior to the full onset of dystonia, and released two years later by Rounder Records, Live at the Ragged Edge (by Tom Adams and Michael Cleveland) won the IBMA award for "Instrumental Album of the Year" in 2004. "If I'm never able to play like that again, I'm glad people got to hear that particular show," says Tom.

Currently working to perfect a two-finger style of playing, Tom is contemplating his next album, tentatively entitled, "One Down, Two to Go."