Roster
Cade Botts & Lawnmower
Cade Botts grew up in Huntsville, Tennessee. After hearing his cousin’s band at a family reunion, he took up banjo at ten—his grandmother bought the instrument and Ralph Stanley records. He played in his high school bluegrass band, then studied music theory at UT Knoxville. COVID pulled him all the way back in. His master’s thesis, Bluegrass: A Voicing, mapped the trio stacks and timbre that make one band sound like itself. In 2023 the IBMA Foundation named him the Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar.
That research didn’t stay on the page. It became Lawnmower: tight three-part singing, original story songs like “Run Ricky Run,” and the reunion-stage spirit still in it. Cade is the founder—banjo, voice, and the ear that wrote the parts down and then went out and played them.