In deeply divisive, stressful times like today, Alison Krauss & Union Station consistently aim to provide comfort, joy and unity, wrapped in a pristine package of extraordinary musicianship.
Veteran dobro and lap steel guitar player Jerry Douglas is a key piece of this gift, which will return to Davenport’s Adler Theatre for a concert on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, this Sept. 11, 2026 at 7:30 p.m.
Known as the preeminent master of the dobro (a resophonic, or resonator, guitar), he’s earned 30 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) awards, 16 Grammy awards, 10 Academy of Country Music awards, 3 CMA “Musician of The Year” awards and received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Americana Music Association, among many other notable accolades.
A renowned musician who’s credited on recording well over 2,000 songs, Douglas is also a band leader, producer, composer and a member of Alison Krauss & Union Station since 1998.
He’s recorded with artists as diverse as Garth Brooks, Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, Phish, Dolly Parton, Susan Ashton, Paul Simon, Mumford & Sons, Keb' Mo', Ricky Skaggs, Elvis Costello, Tommy Emmanuel, James Taylor, Johnny Mathis and Molly Tuttle as well as performing on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the follow-up "Down From the Mountain" tour with Alison Krauss and Union Station. He has collaborated with various groups including The Whites, New South, The Country Gentlemen, Strength in Numbers, and Elvis Costello's Sugar Canes.
Over four decades, Krauss (now, 55, who burst onto the scene as a 14-year-old fiddle prodigy) and her band are considered one of the most influential and widely celebrated acts in bluegrass and roots music.
Known for an immaculately crafted but endlessly surprising sound that transcends the boundaries of roots, country, rock & roll, and pop, Alison Krauss & Union Station released their highly anticipated new album, “Arcadia,” in 2025.
This marked their first studio album since the 2011 “Paper Airplane” — a critically lauded, multiple Grammy Award-winning LP that debuted at #1 on the Billboard Country, Bluegrass, and Folk Album charts.
Over the years, Alison Krauss & Union Station have brought their live show to sold-out performances at famed venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre, The Greek Theatre, Radio City Music Hall, and London’s Royal Festival Hall, in addition to supporting Paul Simon in Hyde Park for his 2012 Graceland reunion. They now continue the celebration of their new music with the Arcadia 2026 Tour.
In addition to Krauss (fiddle, lead vocal) and Douglas (Dobro, lap steel, vocals), the band features Ron Block (banjo, guitar, vocals), Barry Bales (bass, vocals), and highly acclaimed and celebrated tenor vocalist Russell Moore (guitar, mandolin, lead vocal).
“We just tried to find more places to play that we didn't play last year, and they came up with 80 more. So we'll do those this year. I think we're going to go back out next year,” Douglas (a 70-year-old Ohio native) said in an interview with WVIK Monday, Aug. 3.
“A lot of them are old restored halls, which are great, you know, we love those,” he said, noting a recent date at the Capitol Theatre in Wheeling, W. Va., where his 91-year-old mother lives. “The last time we tried to play it, it had been condemned. And so they restored it, rewired it. It was really nice.”
That theater originally opened in 1929, was closed in 2006, and restored to reopen in 2009. Davenport’s Adler Theatre originally opened in 1931 as an RKO movie house, and was restored in 1986.
“It was beautiful, but I had a chance to go see my mother and we had a day off, so I took off and came back just in time to do sound check,” Douglas recalled of Wheeling. They really appreciate playing historic venues like the Adler and Capitol.
“I love playing those theaters. They were made for us, really. It's perfect,” he said. Krauss and her band haven’t played the Adler since March 2002.
Back at the Adler on 9/11
Their upcoming Adler date falls on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist Sept. 11 attacks, and Douglas has strong memories of that time, in 2001. They were riding the high of the massive success of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack.
“The record came out about the same time as the tragedy, and people were just looking for something honest, and there was that record,” he recalled. “It couldn't be more honest, you know, than early country music all recorded the same way that they recorded back in the '30s and '40s.
"And it had a movie as a vehicle instead of the other way around. And yeah, everybody was just looking for something honest, and there was that record, just as honest as it can possibly be, and playing songs that we were all told that we would never make any money playing. ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ or any of those kind of songs.”
“I think the only thing that outsold ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou’ records were Bibles maybe,” Douglas said, noting the record went on to sell over 10 million copies. The band is also in the film (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen), starring George Clooney, John Turturro and John Goodman.
The soundtrack won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002, and Grammys for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals (for singer Dan Tyminski, whose voice overdubbed George Clooney's in the film on “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” Nashville songwriter Harley Allen, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band's Pat Enright), and for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for "O, Death" by Ralph Stanley. It is one of only three movie soundtracks to have ever won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
“We're in the movie where they ride the guy out on a rail toward the end. We're the band on stage with Clooney and Turturro, and it was fun,” Douglas said. “I learned a lot, and my respect for actors went up a great deal in that one day, watching them do take after take after take. They were only using one camera, so they'd have to do it from different angles, and I'd never seen that done before.”
They shot in Mississippi in mid-July, with no air conditioning, all wearing wool suits.
“It was hot, hot, hot. There was one room that had air conditioning and Clooney was in it with us,” Douglas said. “He was a good guy. He was just one of us just hanging out with the guys. And everybody was enjoying their work. Everybody was enjoying what they were doing. We all knew this was going to be a big film, but I remember asking T-Bone (music producer T-Bone Burnett), I said, how many do you think this will sell? He said 8 million. He wasn't far off.”
“It was just amazing. But it was a timing thing, you know,” he said. “It was just the country needed something honest.”
The band was in New York to promote the record Sept. 7, 2001, just four days before hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, killing 2,996 people (including the 19 hijackers).
“We did David Letterman on the 7th of September, and I remember leaving New York, going to LaGuardia, and looking back over my shoulder at the city, and I was just thinking, how does the world hold this up, this massive concrete and steel?” Douglas recalled, noting the band will bring up the anniversary in Davenport.
“It's amazing how the country pulled itself back together” right after 9/11, he said. “It was a crazy, crazy time, you know. We've sort of fallen apart again. We need to find somehow, some way to get back together. And we don't need that, we don't need a big tragedy. We just need to consider that we all have so much more in common than we have negative parts. I mean, it doesn't have to be this way.”
Music – and Krauss’s angelic voice especially – can be a crucial source of comfort, healing and unity for all people, the dobro master said.
“I believe it's a healing thing. You know, it's one of the things we have that we can go to in the worst of times,” Douglas said. “Music, even in the Depression, was the last thing to go. There were the speakeasies, there were the places where the bands could go and play. You know, musicians were working during the Depression. And because music is the last thing people want to get rid of, we need that. We need music.
"We need to feel good, and music makes you feel good. It makes you forget about all your troubles and all the crazy things that are going on and all the crazy things people are doing to each other.”
“Leave that behind and come sit down and just enjoy yourself in a place where there won't be any politics, there won't be any division,” he said. “We're all about healing, you know, music is about healing. So that's why I do what I do.”
The “O Brother” success also helped boost the popularity of bluegrass, which has grown in the past 25 years, Douglas said.
“Suddenly they were more accepted than they had been before,” he said. “It was just like, oh, you played on ‘O Brother’? Oh wow, okay, we'll pay attention to this now. It did elevate everybody, and being part of that was a great thing. And yeah my records sold better after that, I'm sure. And everyone's did, everyone that was involved. It helped us all. It was a nice trickle down.”
Other career highlights
Other career highlights have been recording with James Taylor for his 1991 single “Copperline,” and Paul Simon on the latter’s “The Boxer” and “American Tune” for Douglas’s 2012 solo album, “Traveler.”
Of Taylor, “he is what you see,” he said. “He is definitely just what you think he is. I kept asking him, why don't you run for office? And he said, oh, that would be a really bad idea. And I said, but your skeletons are all out of the closet. You got nothing to hide.”
Douglas also has opened for Simon, who continues to tour at 84.
“We just had a blast. Paul's a really special fella and another one of those, like James, you know, he is exactly what you think he is and that's all good,” he said. “And him and Elvis Costello and just other people that I've worked with like that, people with longevity like them, there's a reason for that. You know, they're really nice, honest people. They don't step on others. They feel lucky to be where they are.”
Douglas turned 70 this year, which he called “a huge milestone, but you know, I feel just the same as I did when I was 40,” he said. “It's just, it's the new 45.”
Even at 55, Krauss retains a crystalline, ethereal purity to her voice.
“She just takes care of her voice,” Douglas said. “We had to cancel a show in Columbus at the Ohio State Fair the other day because we had just done 3 and a half weeks straight, and she'd sang, you know, we're doing 36 songs a night. So it's like her voice was hamburger by the time we got there. It was just time for us all to go home.”
Krauss called Douglas “the greatest dobro player the world has ever known,” on their live album from 2003.
A native of Decatur, Ill., she met him at 14, when Ken Irwin from Rounder Records brought her to Nashville to search out a producer for her first records. “And Bela Fleck and Sam Bush and I sat down and listened to her, and at the time she just really wanted to play the fiddle,” Douglas recalled. “You sang a song and we went, whoa, you're a singer. You're a great fiddle player, but you're really a singer.”
“It was obvious. It was so obvious,” he said, noting he worked on her first two albums. “I produced the second one, ‘I've Got That Old Feeling.’ And she's a fast learner, so she's been producing her records, or at least with the band, when we did a band record, we all get involved in it.
"But now this time out, this time out for ‘Arcadia,’ Alison really had this one under her arm. She knew exactly what this record was going to be. So we just kind put our parts on there and watched her paint.”
Douglas (15 years older than Krauss) also got into bluegrass as a teen, and first started touring at 16, playing for a band called the Country Gentlemen, “who were sort of the top of the bluegrass heap at that point,” he said. “And I was on the road with them. I am a road scholar. I was all set to go to college, and then I took this trip out on the road for the summer working with a band, and that's what I decided I needed to do instead of going to college to be an English professor. I thought I would just become a musician instead, and it's served me well.”
Douglas earned the ultimate honor in September 2024, being inducted into the International Bluegrass Musicians Association Hall of Fame.
“When people put you in a box with Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs, you know, when they put you in a Hall of Honor with those people, it is a shock,” he said Monday. “It's one of those things, I don't belong here. But they think I do. I'll take their word for it. And I'm very happy to be there. I'm honored and humbled and all of those things.”
“That's not why we play this music. It's not for the awards or the inductions,” Douglas added. “It's because it just makes us feel so good and we see it translate to the audience. And that's what it's all about for us. It's not the awards. It's the giving part. We all love that. Everybody on that stage loves doing what they're doing, and it translates to the audience.”
One of biggest Grammy winners in history
The recipient of a mind-blowing 46 Grammy nominations, Krauss has earned 27 Grammys – the most of any female artist in history not named Beyonce. Krauss won her first award at the 33rd Grammys in 1990 for Best Bluegrass Recording for “I've Got That Old Feeling.”
She is so unpretentious and down to earth, Douglas said she doesn’t keep any of her Grammys at home; they are at her mom’s house.
“She doesn't like that kind of positioning, you know. She's more into giving it to everybody else than taking it for herself,” he said.
Though the 35-minute, 10-song “Arcadia” was the band’s first record in 14 years, it had taken several years to make, he noted. “There were 4 or 5 songs that we'd recorded over the last 10 years, but most of it was done in the last 3 years before the record came out. And we took our time with it.
"It took a long time to make that record. But we have another one in the can right now. So I don't know when that one will be released, but we'll see what happens then if we go back out and do more. You know, I may be touring when I'm 80.”
A review of “Arcadia” at mojo4music.com said: “…the sonic palette is richly clean, the harmonies stacked, and Jerry Douglas’s dobro an empathetic, keening presence in constant dialogue with the singers, now the dominant solo instrument in the ensemble.”
Another review at pureeffectusic.com called the album “a carefully woven tapestry of historical ballads, emotional confessionals, and masterful musicianship. True to their tradition, the band delivers not just bluegrass, but a mature and emotionally resonant form of Americana. Arcadia doesn’t seek to dazzle with speed or technical wizardry—though it easily could—but instead chooses to move the listener slowly, deeply, and deliberately.”
Impact of new singer
Russell Moore (an acclaimed bluegrass veteran) has been an easy, seamless transition, to replace singer/guitarist Dan Tyminski (who was lead vocalist on the hit “Man of Constant Sorrow” from “O Brother”) last year.
“I had him come and be a guest in my band, the Earls of Leicester,” Douglas said. “He's just an amazing, amazing thing. There are not too many Russell Moores out there in the world. He's a great singer, such control and such a range. When Dan decided to continue on with his thing, his solo career, Alison and I kind of looked at each other and we said, Russell Moore at the same time, sort of like the same graduating class as Dan.”
Moore is 62 and Tyminski is 59.
“They came along at about the same time and had the same influences,” Douglas said. “It’s just a tiny change in the voice, but boy, you know, it just seems like it's so easy. It's so easy to sing with him, and Alison's really enjoying it. So, Alison's happy, we're all happy.”
They decided to tour two years straight because last year went so well, he said.
“If you're going to travel and tour, we're doing it the right way. We're staying on the ground. We're out there in buses and trucks instead of flying, being at the mercy of someone else's schedule,” Douglas said. “So we're comfortable and everybody got through it without any great scathing. So we just enjoyed it so much and enjoyed the crew that we had out as well. It was wonderful. one big old traveling 25-person family.”
In addition to dobro and lap steel guitar, Douglas gets to add his voice to create beautiful backup vocals and harmonies in the group.
“It is really special to be part of it,” he said. “With dobro, it's sort of another voice. It's a human voice, you know, so it's easy to get involved in the background singing and support that with another voice like the dobro. And I enjoy backing her, just her lines, her solo lines, and injecting things in, trying to raise her profile instead of mine.”
He also admires Krauss’s fiddle playing, and one of the tunes he wrote specifically for her is called “Union House Branch,” an instrumental only from the 2004 record “Lonely Cuts Both Ways.”
“It's kind of hard to play. You can't play fiddle and sing at the same time, it would drive you insane,” Douglas said.
Of all his projects, he’s most proud of both Union Station and his Transatlantic Sessions.
“It's a legacy, you know,” Douglas said, noting the latter is a collaboration between British and American musicians. “We bring people from the United States over to the UK and put them with people they've never met before. And people that are household names over there, and I bring household names from here, we throw them together and just see what comes out,” he said. “That's one of the other things that I really love that I've been a part of.”
For tickets to the Adler Sept. 11 show, with special guest Theo Lawrence, click HERE.
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