Photos by Jason Tanner
Whether they’re playing for 10 people in a nursing home or stepping onto a festival stage in front of thousands, the Blue Bridge Boys are happy as long as they’re making music together. For the four Owensboro-area teenagers, that simple love of playing has already taken them farther than they imagined — from early performances around their hometown to viral videos, a national competition victory, and the biggest stages they’ve played yet. And they’re just getting started.
The Blue Bridge Boys — Cruse Edwards, Noah Mason, Parker Malone, and Levi Hausner — range from 14 to 16 years old, but several of them have already been making music together for much of their lives. What started with lessons and a couple of childhood friends playing together has gradually grown into a band with an expanding sound and increasingly ambitious goals.
“I know if tomorrow we didn’t have anybody in the community liking us, we weren’t famous, we’d still be playing even if it was just on one of our back porches,” Mason said. “We just love playing music.”
That’s the essence of how the Blue Bridge Boys began.
Edwards, 15, and Mason, 16, had known each other since they were young through church and school. Mason began taking fiddle lessons from well-known local musician and instructor Randy Lanham about a decade ago. When Edwards became interested in playing, Mason’s family pointed him in the same direction.
Lanham soon helped get the two friends playing together.
“We’d always been friends since we were little, and so we started playing music together,” Edwards said.
At the time, Edwards was playing mandolin, and the pair called themselves the Bluegrass Brothers. There wasn’t a grand plan to turn it into something bigger. They simply enjoyed playing and took opportunities wherever they could find them, including performing for homebound residents and at nursing homes.
Mason can laugh now about just how early they were in their musical development.
“We were more just cute. We did not sound good,” he said with a laugh. “I mean, it was very bad to the ears.”
But they kept playing. They performed for people who were homebound, visited nursing homes, and took whatever opportunities came their way. More importantly, they kept getting better.
A few years later, Lanham provided another connection. Malone, now 14, was also taking lessons from him, and the young musicians began jamming together before eventually adding him to the group on fiddle and vocals.
“That was when we kind of started wanting to really start the band up,” Mason said.
There was one problem: The Bluegrass Brothers name was already being used. So the group became the Blue Bridge Boys, a name with a distinctly Owensboro connection.
Then came another significant addition.
Hausner, 15, joined in March, expanding the band’s possibilities considerably. Hausner plays piano, drums, guitar, pedal steel and accordion. Edwards plays banjo and guitar while singing and writing songs. Mason plays bass and sings, while Malone plays fiddle and sings.
That collection of instruments — and musical interests — has made defining the Blue Bridge Boys increasingly difficult.
“Obviously, primarily we’re a bluegrass band, but as of recently, we’ve been getting more into kind of folky stuff,” Edwards said. “We have some rock stuff that we do. I can’t really put it to one genre. I feel like it’s a mix of a lot of things that combine into one.”
Americana might come closest, but the band members aren’t particularly concerned with finding the right label.
Their influences are almost as varied as the instruments on stage.
Their influences stretch from the music that first inspired them to pick up an instrument to artists well outside traditional bluegrass. Edwards grew up looking to Ricky Skaggs but has more recently found inspiration in Bob Dylan and 1970s rock, particularly with his songwriting. Hausner was raised on The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and later gravitated toward Pink Floyd and other rock from the 1960s and ’70s.
Billy Strings is another shared influence.
“Down to the bottom of every single song, you can see a type of bluegrass,” Mason said. “Whether it’s the guitar in it, or you can tell by the end of it that there is bluegrass influence in every song. But I would say that most of our songs aren’t necessarily traditional bluegrass songs.”
For Edwards, refusing to fit neatly into a category is part of the appeal.
“If we were to just call ourselves a bluegrass band, we wouldn’t be able to have drums and keyboard, and it just wouldn’t be the same music,” he said. “I think it’s kind of freeing not having a specific genre.”
As their sound has expanded, so has their audience. The Blue Bridge Boys initially built their following the old-fashioned way: playing around Owensboro. More recently, social media has introduced them to people far beyond western Kentucky.
Earlier this year, a casual video of Edwards and Malone playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” exploded on TikTok, eventually generating millions of views. The band has since leaned into short, energetic performance videos showcasing the speed and musicianship that have become a calling card.
Hausner said some of their best-performing clips put the camera close to the musicians and let the music do the work.
“Our first song we posted on TikTok was us on a roof playing guitar, banjo, and stuff like that, and it was super fast,” he said. “That did pretty good, and then after that, we just started posting really up-close, quick songs.”
The online attention has coincided with the biggest opportunity yet for the group.
Earlier this summer, the Blue Bridge Boys won the national Battle of the Banjos competition connected to the Earl Scruggs Music Festival. Edwards said his mother entered them without telling the band, and they didn’t know anything about the competition until learning they had reached the top eight.
From there, they kept advancing, ultimately claiming the top spot. The victory earned them performances at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Mill Spring, North Carolina.
“It’s going to be the biggest festival we’ve ever played at,” Mason said. “It’s the second festival that we’ve actually ever played at. So it’s a really big deal.”
The competition also required public voting, giving the teenagers a firsthand look at just how many people back home were following their journey.
“It just made us really realize the fan base that we have,” Mason said. “We’re just really grateful for everybody who voted and everybody who supported us through all that.”
The band will get another hometown spotlight in November, when the Blue Bridge Boys serve as grand marshals of the Owensboro-Daviess County Christmas Parade. This year’s “Sounds of Christmas” theme celebrates Owensboro’s musical heritage, with organizers saying the band’s selection reflects the community’s connection to bluegrass.
The long-term dream is becoming clearer, too. The band has been incorporating more original material into its performances and hopes to record those songs and eventually release them on streaming platforms. A record deal would be welcome. So would a world tour, Edwards joked.
But the bigger goal is simply to see how far four friends can take this.
“I think we’re going to try to go with the Blue Bridge Boys as long as possible, no matter what that means,” Edwards said. “Whether it’s recording, whether it’s the world tour — that would be insane — but just playing this with friends. I think our goals are to get our music out there to as many people as possible.”
Mason said there are ultimately three things that keep them playing: the community that has supported them, their own love of music, and their faith.
He said the group views its musical ability as a gift from God and wants to use it wherever the opportunity leads.
“We’re gonna take this as long as God will let us go,” Mason said. “We believe our goal is to share Him throughout that gift wherever He takes us, whether it’s a really big show in front of thousands of people or it’s 10 people in a nursing home.”
For the Blue Bridge Boys, either one is still a stage worth playing. OL
