With 14 fresh original songs, two prominent and prolific songwriters in bluegrass and Americana music, Tim Stafford and Thomm Jutz give us Lost Voices with their sturdy, handsomely-crafted and lyrically attractive fare. Their collaboration is a fruitful one that goes deeper into their soulful roots than ever before. Their mutual love for history, vintage guitars, and well-crafted songs brought the two Nashville-based musicians together about five years ago. Admirers of each other’s unique writing, smooth singing, and solid playing, it was only logical that they would make a record together. Songs are brought to life with the cohesive accompaniment of Mark Fain (bass), Tammy Rogers (fiddle), Shawn Richardson (mandolin) and Ron Block (banjo). Dale Ann Bradley makes a cameo appearance on “Callie Lou,” a story based on a scene from Harriette Arnow’s ground-breaking novel, “The Dollmaker.”    

Stafford hails from Kingsport, Tennessee. From 1990-1993, he played guitar with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He decided to quit when he returned from a long tour and his son didn’t recognize him. An original member of the IBMA Board of Directors, he also taught history at East Tennessee State University and came close to getting his Ph.D. In 1994, Stafford formed Blue Highway. In 2004, he released first solo project. In 2010, he released a duet album with Steve Gulley, and additional solo projects followed in the mid-2000s. Stafford is a multiple winner of the IBMA Songwriter of the Year Award (2014, 2017).

Hailing from Germany, Thomm Jutz now resides in Nashville. Learning guitar as a teen, he began performing country music in Germany in various cover bands, and then studied classical guitar at the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music. In 2003, Juttz (pronounced “yootz”) emigrated to the U.S. on a Diversity Immigrant Visa program. He worked with singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier, Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra, Bobby Bare, Maura O’Connell, David Olney, Kim Richey and others. Several groups have covered his songs, and he teaches a songwriting class at Belmont University. In 2011, Juttz released a three-album project featuring original songs about the American Civil War. In 2016, with Peter Cooper, Juttz wrote and produced an album of songs about Mac Wiseman. His 2016 duet album with Craig Market was called Nowhere to Hide. In 2017, he released a bluegrass album of original songs called Crazy If You Let It, and in 2020, he released To Live in Two Worlds, Volume 1. Juttz won the 2021 IBMA Award for Songwriter of the Year.

Now, Lost Voices features Stafford & Jutz’s profoundly earthy material with warm-hearted sentiments. They bring to life, in song, a variety of ignored, forgotten and overlooked characters from the annals of history, diaries or photographs. “We can hear them in the halls where freedom rings, they’re calling out to Heaven on angels’ wings.” If you like engaging stories from neglected chapters from yesteryear, Lost Voices will introduce you to a ruthless outlaw (“The Ballad of Kinnie Wagner”), black face minstrel (“Vaudeville Blues”), Appalachian women (“High Mountain Rising”), Navajo Indians (“Code Talker”), Black baseball barnstormers (“The Blue Grays”), a fictional family feuding in Eastern Kentucky (“No Witness in the Laurel but the Leaves”), and even the voices of trees (“The Standing People”) and language of old American trains (“The Queen and the Crescent”). The title cut, also written with Charley Stefl, closes the album with a tribute to all the lost voices that still have so much to say.  

Stafford & Juttz breathe present-day life into voices that speak from lyrically intimate and melodically compelling spaces. With enchanting and accessible folk melodies, the songs not only tell stories but give us lyrics that are thoughtful and attractive. Lost Voices has already climbed as high as #21 on The Roots Music Report's Top 50 Bluegrass Album Chart. (Joe Ross, Roots Music Report)