Like any teenager, sometimes Grace Bowers needs a little space. She’ll jump in her Jeep Wrangler with George, her Goldendoodle, and blast Funkadelic while cruising Tennessee back roads. She has a thing for abandoned buildings, once finding a battered old farmhouse with three grand pianos sitting out in the open. On another drive, she came across Water Valley, a tiny hamlet near Williamsport. The whole town was for sale (for $725K).
For now, Bowers lives with her family outside Nashville. But given her meteoric rise, she’ll probably be able to buy her own town someday. Even more arresting than her naturally curly locks are her ridiculous guitar chops, which have propelled her onto stages with Dolly Parton, Tyler Childers, Lainey Wilson, Susan Tedeschi, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. She’ll make her Grand Ole Opry debut on July 30 (her eighteenth birthday), and she’s nominated for Instrumentalist of the Year at September’s Americana Music Awards.
A stunning player, fluent in the blues, searing rock and roll, and more, Bowers says she’s long been more interested in starting a band than going it solo. The result—Wine on Venus, the debut album from Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge—arrives in August. “I’ve always wanted to have something like Sly and the Family Stone,” she says. Bowers recruited the Hodge Podge members while playing in clubs and jam sessions around Nashville. Her youth was a nonfactor. “My band treats me as if we’re all the same age on a musical level.”
Produced by John Osborne, the bearded half of Brothers Osborne, Wine on Venus potently mixes funk, blues, and soul. But what’s most striking is the restraint Bowers shows, displaying the ability to have a “conversation” using the instrument, like David Gilmour of Pink Floyd or her favorite guitarist, Leslie West of the band Mountain. “Grace has what is known as ‘the flow,’” Osborne says. “If you watch videos of Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan, they leave their body, and music comes out. She has that.”
Bowers first picked up a guitar at age nine after watching a YouTube video of Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Later, she discovered B. B. King while flipping through satellite radio channels in her mom’s car. She was shy growing up and bullied in middle school, and her parents were searching for something to help boost her confidence. Sports and other pursuits came and went, but the guitar stuck. Her mother, Lisa, even offered to take lessons with her. That lasted about two weeks. “She has an innate sense of playing that I clearly did not have,” Lisa says. “As a parent, you want your kid to find something they love doing. The guitar gave her a place where she felt like she belonged.”
During the pandemic, Bowers began streaming her practice sessions on Reddit, amassing more than seventy thousand followers. In 2021, the family moved from the Bay Area of California, where Bowers grew up, to Nashville, partly to put her closer to fellow musicians. She’s forged a special bond with Hodge Podge singer Esther Okai-Tetteh, a twenty-year-old Belmont University student whom she first met at a rock camp for girls. “We wrote most of the album on the floor in my bedroom,” Bowers says. “She is great with melody, and that’s kind of where I struggle. We collaborated on the lyrics, constantly throwing ideas at each other.”
As with any fresh talent, the skeptics have appeared. She’s experienced blatant misogyny—“One guy at a club told me I had to plug my guitar into an amp,” she says. “He felt bad after I was done.” And some view her lack of singing as a hindrance. “Carlos Santana and Jeff Beck barely sang a note,” says musician Devon Allman, who invited Bowers to play at a 2022 Allman Family Revival show at the Ryman. “She’ll be fine.”
“When you look at Susan Tedeschi, you automatically think of Derek Trucks,” Bowers points out of the singer-guitarist duo, one of her favorite bands. “I love to play. Being onstage is the best thing in the world. It’s a feeling I can’t put into words.”
