Lowcountry Love Story: Meet Grammy-winning bluegrass artist Shelby Means and her Holy City rocker husband Joel Timmons

Shelby Means wasn’t quite sure about this e-mail attachment. She’d met Joel Timmons in 2012, at a music festival in Bristol, Tennessee, where he seemed to go out of his way to hear her perform, and again when she visited Charleston to play at Awendaw Green in fall 2013. But what was this MP3 file? She pressed play.

I saw her on State Street, on the Tennessee side
And I knew in an instant, someday she’d be mine
I went to her concert; I wore a disguise
And I couldn’t hold steady when she flashed them bright eyes
My heart was a’ pounding as I emptied my glass
Struck blind by a vision of things that would pass

Shelby and her bluegrass band, Della Mae, called Nashville home but spent most of the year on tour. With her tall frame, blonde hair, and classic beauty, it wasn’t the first lovestruck fan the upright bassist had encountered. Not to mention, she had a boyfriend, and she’d told this guy about him back in Awendaw. Still, she listened as Joel’s prophecy continued:

Our courtship was torment, with us both on the road
Long Mondays and red eyes and tears on the phone
So I moved to Nashville and became a side man
Got to play at the Opry, but I still missed the sand
She taught me to horse ride, we took trips to the sea
And on Cumberland Island, I got
down on one knee

Whoa, she thought, the boyfriend definitely shouldn’t hear this. Shelby played it for her mom and for her brother. What she didn’t do—for two anguishing weeks—was reply.

Joel tried to shrug it off. He was already Charleston’s own version of a rock star, and his romantic stumbles provided lyrical fodder for his band, Sol Driven Train. He’d been the subject of crushes for decades, from Sullivan’s Island Elementary to Wando High School to the College of Charleston. But that passing first meeting with his “fantasy girlfriend”—they’d chatted about Della Mae’s State Department tour to south and central Asia (“every ’stan but Afghanistan”) and his upcoming surf trip to Morocco—left a deep impression. He tried to catch her attention the next year in Bristol, but only got close enough to see her step out of a car with her boyfriend. “I was feeling dejected,” recalls Joel. “I figured I should probably get over this pipe dream.”

Later, back home in Charleston, he saw Della Mae on an upcoming Barn Jam lineup and finagled his way onto the bill. “Pipedream,” the song, was complete, but worried he might come off as crazy, he cut it from his set and kept the lyrics folded in his pocket. Shelby got back in the van and drove away with her band, clueless to the future the tall fellow in the opening act had imagined for her.

Joel sent the e-mail a few days later with a disclaimer about his romantic streak and active imagination. In the final verse, he sings:

I saw our children gifted and strong
Right there on State Street, I heard them all sing along
Her hair turned silver and our love turned gold
There we were together, happy and old
I’ve seen it so clearly and I know that it’s true
But she don’t even know me, what am I supposed to do?

Like all the best country songs, the last verse brought it home. Shelby did eventually respond. “It was either the greatest pickup line in the entire world or the creepiest one,” she recalls. “Either way, it was worth a reply.”

(Left) Shelby’s career leaped forward when she joined the all-women bluegrass band Della Mae in 2012; (right) Joel recording Psychedelic Surf Country at Phantom Studios in Nashville.

A Lyrical Romance

A few months later, newly single, Shelby flew to Charleston, where she and Joel shared an awkward first kiss at the airport before their first date, paddleboarding in the Folly River. A pipe dream manifested reality. Three-and-a-half years later, at their 2017 wedding near Shelby’s hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, Joel played the song “Pipedream.” Specifics like Cumberland Island were updated to Black Balsam Knob, but it was all coming true.

Marriage coincided with the release of Tip My Heart, the couple’s first album as Sally & George, a folk and vintage rock-and-roll project assuming the alter egos of Shelby’s maternal grandparents. NPR compared its rockabilly energy to Buddy Holly. “When Means’ and Timmons’ voices come together, it feels emblematic of the romantic rush at the center of the song’s lyric,” read NPR’s review, adding that the album does a “public service” by proving that “things which made music work half a century ago can still cut through.…”

Joel moved to Nashville, burning up the highway between tours with Sol Driven Train and Sally & George. The duo released another collection in 2020, Take You on a Ride, before bailing on Nashville in the wake of COVID, a devastating tornado, and the feeling of a career plateau.

No sooner had they settled on Folly Beach than Shelby got a call she had to answer: an offer to join rising bluegrass sensation Molly Tuttle’s band, Golden Highway, for a national tour. As the couple traded cooking breakfasts together and evening walks on Folly Beach for texts and video calls from the interstate, Shelby journaled lyrics to cope with the loneliness:

Driving out of Nashville, crying eyes behind the wheel
Hurts so bad every time I go.

Her difficult decision to leave proved fortuitous: in February 2024, Shelby won a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album for the group’s City of Gold. A month later, she entered The Parlor studio on Nashville’s Music Row for three days, recording her original songs—including “Suitcase Blues,” pulling the opening lyrics from her journal. The biggest names in bluegrass backed her up: Sam Bush on mandolin, Jerry Douglas on dobro, Bryan Sutton on guitar, Ron Block on banjo, and Michael Cleveland on fiddle. Billy Strings and Tim O’Brien also make appearances.

These are the musicians who sparked the bluegrass revival in the ’90s, who backed Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton, and who headline arenas today. The result, Shelby Means Bluegrass, will be released this summer. Joel also made use of his extra time. Shelby’s album arrives on the heels of his debut solo album, Psychedelic Surf Country, out this month. For Shelby and Joel, ages 37 and 45 respectively, the albums are the culmination of decades of patient work and the dawn of a new era as songwriters and performers.

Bluegrass Roots

As a kid I had a hard time, waking for the bus
My daddy had a special way of getting through to us
He’d pull up the window shade and sit right on the bed
I can still hear it just rolling in my head
That 5-string wake up call, it’s the loudest one of all

One of 11 original songs (plus two covers) on Shelby’s record, “5-String Wake Up Call” recounts her childhood in rural Wyoming. Laramie’s top pickers gathered in her family’s living room on weekend evenings. By high school, the teen traveled the West to play at bluegrass meet-ups. In college, she formed a band that performed in Slovakia, igniting her “musical diplomacy.”

“That was the first time I realized how music could take me places,” Shelby recalls. That University of Wyoming ensemble’s arrangement of her song, “Streets of Boulder,” is the same heard on the opening track of her album, featuring members of Golden Highway, including Molly Tuttle on harmony vocals.

Shelby credits renowned dobro player Jerry Douglas, a 16-time Grammy winner and producer for City of Gold, with showing her how to be a more aggressive rhythmic leader. That confidence conveys throughout the album, where Douglas is a frequent presence. “Shelby holds sway over whatever band she’s in. When she has an idea, I listen,” says Douglas. “She knows what she wants, and she’s good at explaining it, so we can do a lot more playing than talking.”

The album also marks an identity shift: she’s no longer just the bass player. Shelby is a singer and a songwriter, who also happens to be a Grammy-winning upright bassist. “A lot of people move to Nashville with a guitar and a song in their back pocket,” says Shelby. “I moved with a bass, but I could also sing, so that got me jobs and kept me around the scene.”

“Suitcase Blues,” the album’s fourth song, laments her life away from Joel:

Dragging my bass through foreign lands
Hardly home, heartsick and depressed
It’s a lonesome road, that I choose, packing-up-my-suitcase blues

It’s one of several songs the couple cowrote, after Shelby sent Joel a voice memo of the first verse from the road. Writing its lyrics together strengthened their marriage—they needed to establish that the decision to leave Nashville was mutual, not him pulling her away. “We were working on the chorus and I was lying on the ground getting in my creative space, and I just started crying because it was getting so real,” Shelby recalls of that process. “It hurts so bad every time I go. I really felt what I was saying. It was like, ‘Keep digging, we’re almost there.’”

Joel with Ethan Jodziewicz and Maya de Vitry at Maine’s Ossipee Valley Music Festival last summer.

Lowcountry Jams

“It’s not just the dog that gets sad when the suitcase comes out,” says Joel of life on the road or on Folly Beach while Shelby tours. In 2021, he realized that Sally & George had “lost their bass player.” His Sol Driven Train bandmates were starting families, and he needed a new outlet for songs like “End of the Empire,” a composition that swells with cool energy like the waves it illustrates:

Disappear into the white water, double overhead
You don’t have to listen to the music that you’re being fed
Climbing out onto the rocks to meet the rising tide
But the waves are crashing down and now there ain’t nowhere to hide

Shelby came up with the first couplet in the Virgin Islands, sitting in a dinghy as she watched Joel surf during Sol Driven Train’s annual winter tour there. It’s a rare pivot from Joel’s usual storytelling, instead conjuring dreamy images that speak to succumbing to life’s flow like to a wave’s power. “I still don’t really know what it’s about, but it’s inspired by deep change that you can’t understand or control,” says Joel. That could mean getting pounded by a wave into a coral reef or letting go of a goal and just playing music for the sake of it and seeing what happens. That’s the spirit where Psychedelic Surf Country took root.

Joel’s lyrics summon universal emotions with real stories. On “Just a Man,” he sings about his dad cruising Sullivan’s Island in an old pickup, looking for Christmas trees to build a bonfire. “Cottage by the Sea” reflects on his parents’ decision to sell his childhood home on Sullivan’s and move to a newer house on Folly, where he and Shelby now share the top-floor apartment. The radio-ready “Guitars, Guns, and Pickup Trucks” sizzles with its James McMurtry-esque delivery about building a relationship with his cowboy father-in-law.

Psychedelic Surf Country includes its own recognizable names. The first single, a cover of Luke Bell’s “The Bullfighter,” features chilling vocals from Cary Ann Hearst of Shovels & Rope. Oliver Wood, of the Wood Brothers, sings harmony on “Here We Are.” “It feels natural singing with Joel,” he says. “We bonded and just had fun together. I think the recording captures that connection.”

Nashville Connection

Committing to his own project helped Joel push Shelby in the same direction, pursuing the opportunity she had to record her songs with Nashville’s top pickers. “With the money we’ve spent to make two records, we could have made one hell of a Sally & George record, but creatively, we both needed this,” says Joel. “I love bluegrass, and I play it at an amateur to mid-level, but she plays with the very best, and these songs deserved to have that.”

The two albums share a producer, Maya de Vitry, who bonded with Joel and Shelby in Nashville over their shared passions for hiking and getting away from the city. De Vitry dissolved her successful trio, The Stray Birds, in 2020 and knew about the challenges of stepping out on her own. “She shed her chrysalis and became Maya, in her own right,” says Joel. He asked her to lead him on a similar path.

“It’s trippy when Nashville musicians are coming to the studio to support you on your own songs after you’ve been in a collaborative role for so long,” de Vitry explains. “My job is to be their coach and help them work through any self-doubt.” In Joel’s case, that meant harnessing and balancing his playfulness and sincerity. “He’s pulling from real pain but with this explosive lightness and intensity,” says de Vitry.

After seeing the symbiosis between Joel and Maya, Shelby asked her to come to Folly Beach to spend a weekend sifting through years of journaled lyrics to pull together an album of songs. “I remember being sprawled out on the floor of their beach house. Now, we listen to the album, and it’s like, ‘Did we actually make this?’” says de Vitry. “Shelby sings with so much presence on the album. She found this soul and gravity in her voice.”

Hopeful Romantics

A year from now, Shelby’s record could be among the Grammy nominees for Best Bluegrass Album. Nearly every contributing musician, including its star, already has at least one gilded gramophone on their mantels. If it garners that nod, it’ll likely be the first in that category with a Lady Gaga cover—Shelby makes “Million Reasons” all her own in an album highlight. And Psychedelic Surf Country could garner attention from the Americana Music Awards, while building Joel’s reputation as a supporting musician in the studio and on the road.

Together, the albums may change their lives again. They could open the door to a wider audience for a third collection from Sally & George. Or the next step might be a solo tour and festival slots for Shelby, with Joel in the band playing songs he helped to write. Shelby hopes to play with Golden Highway for years to come. And between it all, there’s still talk of those gifted children from “Pipedream,” or just spending more time on Folly Beach with their two-year-old Cavapoo, Casper—maybe even a weekend run to Nashville to play the Opry. In this Lowcountry love song, pipe dreams do come true.

Notable Releases

Sol Driven Train, Lighthouse (2008)
Lighthouse set off a decade-plus of pro-level studio recordings from Sol Driven Train. Joel writes about almost dying in India—he survived via tracheal intubation—and about returning home to Sullivan’s Island. 

Della Mae, This World Oft Can Be (2012)
Shelby’s album with Della Mae earned a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Album, opening big doors of possibility for her career as an upright bassist. 

Sally & George, Tip My Heart (2017)
Joel and Shelby assumed alter egos for their stripped-down Americana duo project, featuring “Pipedream,” a prophetic song about their marriage.

Lovers Leap, Lovers Leap (2019)
A set of campfire sing-along-ready songs from the couple’s collaboration with Western North Carolina musicians Mary Lucey and Billy Cardine.

Sally & George, Take You On a Ride (2020)
The duo’s sophomore effort was released during the pandemic and closes with “That’s My Wife,” a love song Joel wrote for Shelby. 

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, City of Gold (2023)
Shelby’s contributions on this collection from flat-picking sensation Molly Tuttle earned her a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. 

Joel Timmons, Psychedelic Surf Country (2025)
On his solo debut, Joel builds on the classic Sol Driven Train feel-good spirit with deep layers of instrumentation and inspired Nashville-meets-Lowcountry songwriting. 

Shelby Means, Shelby Means Bluegrass (2025) 
Shelby makes the jump from bassist to bandleader with this debut collection of her original bluegrass songs, featuring virtuosos like Sam Bush and Billy Strings. 

WATCH - Sally & George “Tip My Heart” official video: 

WATCH - Joel Timmons performs “The Bullfighter“ live: