Bass Legend Dave Roe's Fortune and Fortitude

On a Tuesday morning in early May, while taking a break from mowing the lawn of his home just outside Nashville, Roe almost sounds puzzled retracing his steps: touring and recording with Johnny Cash and Charlie Louvin, backing up Dwight Yoakam and Loretta Lynn, working as the in-house bassist for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound and as a coveted hired-gun session musician and mainstay in the Nashville gig circuit. “A jack-of-all-trades and an expert at none,” he quips.

That aside, Roe’s self-taught and intuitive upbringing on bass have made him a stylistic chameleon, with perhaps a deeper connection to the rhythms and feel of each genre he plays. His playing evidences a seamless quilting-together of his teachers—’50s, ’60s, and ’70s radio-pop sweetness, the swagger of his mother’s country records, the calm confidence of West Coast Americana, the flair and bravado of funk and disco. His bass parts are classic and unimpeachable, witness marks of a player who learned, with his body and spirit alongside his brain, how to play the bass in a way that people will want to hear.