About

Hello! My name is Harold Nixon. I was born, raised, and live in Winchester, Kentucky with my beautiful family. I was a professional Bluegrass musician for 30~ish years (I started slowing down to almost no musical work in the last 5 years). I began performing when I was around 15 years old with local and regional bands. The first band I joined was John Cosby and The Bluegrass Drifters (John was the first ever winner of the SPBGMA band award in 1984 I think?). The next few years I performed with lots of folks including Dean Osborn, Sam Wilson, Wendy Miller, Mike Lilly, Billie Renee Johnson, Don Stanley, and many others, including the group, Auldridge, Bennett, & Gaudreau. (Fun Fact: while performing with Auldridge, Bennett, & Gaudreau at The Birchmere in Alexandria, VA – I was on the first ever LIVE satellite radio broadcast of Bluegrass Music on XM) Around 1997 I began to play with Unlimited Tradition. The understanding was that it was a temp gig as we were only going to play out the years already booked shows then disband. During that time I got to travel more of the circuit and experience a wider variety of venues. The incarnation of that band consisted of: Ray Craft, Shayne Bartley, Steve Huber, Randy Kohrs, and myself. After disbanding, I started working Dave Evans & Riverbend. I worked with Dave until I started working with JD Crowe in 2001~ish. During my time with Crowe I recording on the album “Lefty’s Old Guitar” which was nominated for a Grammy in 2007 for Best Bluegrass Album. After leaving JD in 2007~ish I ended up going to work for Setel (A teleco Company) in Research & Development. This was my first “Real Job.” During this time I started “helping” Blue Moon Rising after doing some studio work for them on their album “One Lonely Shadow”. I continued working in R&D there for 6 months before leaving. For the next 3 years I continued to play with Blue Moon Rising but never actually joined…maybe I had commitment issues ;) Fast forward to the very end of 2009. I was engineering a recording session at Rick’s On Main Studio. At that session was one of my former band mates Ron Stewart, one of my long-time heroes Adam Steffey, and my “JD Crowe & The New South” replacement John Bowman. It was there among pizza, smoke breaks, stories and jokes that the seed of my last band “The Boxcars” was planted. “The Boxcars” went on to record 4 albums and have many nominations and wins for IBMAs, SPBGMAs, and a 2013 Grammy nomination for “It’s Just A Road”. We disbanded in at the end of 2017. By this time I was already married for seven years with 3 kids. My wife and I started working for the Catholic Diocese of Lexington Kentucky as the pastoral associates in McKee, KY. There we did thinks that needed to be done…clean bathrooms, finacle outreach, fundraising, websites, managed the Thrift Store, maintained and created relationships with donors, setup for church, sent newsletters, intergraded a phone system, fought beavers that ate our trees and damned up our creek etc. It was a job we shared for a year or so until I ended up resigning while my wife continued as full time. Nothing much changed when I quit except I could now cuss anyone I wanted (that’s a joke…kind of) and we had another kid bringing the total to 4. They gave her a raise and I became her volen-told sorry, I mean volunteer. We lived there and worked until November 2023 when we returned to our home in Winchester. This “about” is super ramblely rife with punctuation issues, run on sentences and more. I just tried to jot down a bit of my history, much of which I can’t really remember dates, just to get it down. I hope to come back here and clean this up in the coming weeks.