Scott Miller & The Commonwealth

folk

Scott Miller is an American alt-country and Americana singer-songwriter, born Allen Scott Miller in 1968 in Swoope, Virginia. He took a degree in Russian literature at William & Mary and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1990, where in 1994 he co-founded the V-Roys with lead guitarist John Paul Keith, bassist Paxton Sellers and drummer Jeff Bills; Keith left before the first record and was replaced by Mic Harrison. Originally called the Viceroys, the band changed its name after a legal threat from a Jamaican group of the same name and titled its 1996 debut Just Add Ice as a joke about the missing letters. That record was the first release on Steve Earle's E-Squared Records, and Earle and Ray Kennedy produced both it and 1998's All About Town before the band played its last show on New Year's Eve 1999. Miller then formed the Commonwealth and cut three albums for Sugar Hill Records between 2001 and 2006: Thus Always to Tyrants (2001), a loose concept record about Southern roots that sets Appalachian balladry against electric rock, Upside Downside (2003), and Citation (2006). The band spent a stretch as the house band for the television show Blue Collar TV. In 2008 Miller launched his own label, F.A.Y. Recordings, with the solo album For Crying Out Loud, later releasing Ladies Auxiliary in November 2017. Around 2011 he moved back to the family cattle farm outside Staunton, Virginia, which he still runs, a shift documented in the short film Going Home. He was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2018 and often tours as a trio with bassist Bryn Davies and fiddler Rayna Gellert.

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