Editor's Note: Sister Sadie is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for June 2025. Learn more about the band and their new album, All Will Be Well, which is due out June 27, in this feature, and keep an eye out for more all month long.
Thirteen years and numerous bandmates ago, hard-hitting bluegrassers Deanie Richardson, Gena Britt, Dale Ann Bradley, Tina Adair, and Beth Lawrence gathered at Nashville’s Station Inn for a one-off performance as a supergroup they decided to call Sister Sadie. The “Sadie” was for Tony Rice’s version of the traditional “Little Sadie” and the “Sister” was a nod toward the kinship they felt while preparing for the show.
Now, as the group readies its fourth album, All Will Be Well (out June 27 on Mountain Home Music), Sister Sadie has three new members and, with them, three new ways of approaching the traditional music they love so much.
“We appreciate the talents of the original band for sure,” banjoist Britt said recently via Zoom. “That's what sparked this band to be born. We pay homage to that forever. But, as we have had personnel changes, it's grown. … It changes the dynamic.”
Fiddler Deanie Richardson, the other still-remaining founding member, agrees.
“[With] each new member that's come in, you have to rebrand, you have to rebuild, you have to just redo it all,” she says. “I'm so grateful to those women that we started with, and I'm even more grateful to these women who have come along and forced us to look at things differently, hear things differently, open our brains and creative minds to … a new sound.”
