Molly Tuttle
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307
Ranking
BIRTHDATE
BIRTHPLACE
Santa Clara
,
CA
,
USA
33
5
'
5
"
Molly Tuttle is a Palo Alto-born bluegrass guitar virtuoso and two-time Grammy winner who grew up playing with her father in Silicon Valley jam sessions, became the first woman to win the IBMA Guitar Player of the Year award, earned the first Best New Artist Grammy nomination ever given to a bluegrass artist, and is currently engaged to Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor while touring behind her Grammy-nominated 2025 solo album "So Long Little Miss Sunshine."
Current Tour & Setlist
Tuttle launched 2026 with the "Molly x Marty: Guitars on Fire Tour," a co-headlining run with country legend Marty Stuart, performing her Grammy-nominated single "That's Gonna Leave a Mark" on Jimmy Kimmel Live ahead of the dates. She also played a string of intimate Northern California shows with fiancé Ketch Secor in late April and early May 2026, including sold-out stops at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma, The Center for the Arts in Grass Valley, and the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, and continues to tour behind "So Long Little Miss Sunshine" with her all-female touring band. Fans can expect a setlist drawing from all three Golden Highway albums alongside new solo material, with frequent surprise duets and impromptu acoustic jams.
Early Life
Born January 14, 1993, in Santa Clara, California, and raised in Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley, Molly Tuttle grew up in a household where technology was nowhere on the radar but traditional American roots music was everywhere, with her father Jack Tuttle spending 30 years teaching 80 students a week at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto while also leading the family band through bluegrass jams at pizza parlors, music stores, and California Bluegrass Association events. Diagnosed with alopecia areata at age three and having lost her hair by age four, Tuttle has since become a prominent spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation, turning her earliest personal challenge into a platform for advocacy that has run alongside her music career throughout her adult life. She picked up guitar at eight, banjo at ten, was performing onstage with her father by eleven, recorded her first duet album "The Old Apple Tree" with him at thirteen, and by fifteen had joined the family band The Tuttles alongside her brothers Michael on mandolin and Sullivan on guitar.
Career Highlights
Tuttle earned merit scholarships to Berklee College of Music in 2012, where she won the Chris Austin Songwriting Competition at MerleFest, received the Foundation for Bluegrass Music's first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship, and appeared on A Prairie Home Companion with her father before graduating in 2015 and moving to Nashville. She became the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association's Guitar Player of the Year award in 2017, won it again in 2018, and was named the Americana Music Association's Instrumentalist of the Year, building a reputation as one of the most technically dazzling flatpickers in roots music. Her album "Crooked Tree" with her band Golden Highway won Best Bluegrass Album at the 65th Grammy Awards in 2023, earning her the first Best New Artist nomination ever given to a bluegrass artist, followed by a second Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album for "City of Gold" in 2024; she dissolved Golden Highway in May 2025 and released her solo album "So Long Little Miss Sunshine" that year, which earned Grammy nominations for Best Americana Album and Best Americana Performance for the single "That's Gonna Leave a Mark."
Family & Personal Life
Tuttle and Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor met at the Ryman Auditorium, became friends, then harmony singers, then songwriters and collaborators before announcing their engagement on December 3, 2025, in a post describing a Thanksgiving proposal in an old growth forest surrounded by their families. Secor has co-written several songs with Tuttle across her Golden Highway albums, and the two spent May 2026 playing a string of intimate co-headlining shows together across Northern California, with the couple performing co-written originals alongside covers from the Rolling Stones and John Denver at venues including the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.
