2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest Winner!
photo by Orion Willits Photography
Bookish bite. Sharp harmonies. Songs about saints, scientists, and stubborn women.
Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light is an acoustic folk trio bringing Sumner's original songs to life. Blending bluegrass, folk, and close three-part harmony, the trio pairs virtuosic musicianship with fearless storytelling, creating concerts that are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking.
Sumner writes because she's working something out—or because she's found a story she can't stop thinking about. Her songs wander through labor history, folklore, the American West, and the lives of women history has too often overlooked. Again and again, they hold the past up like a mirror, asking what it still has to teach us today. She believes curiosity leads to empathy, and that stories remain one of our oldest ways of changing how we see one another. Her songs are written to meet listeners where they are: some simply enjoy a great tune; others leave eager to crack open an encyclopedia. Both feel like success.
Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light won the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest, and Sumner is also a winner of the Kerrville New Folk Competition. She has performed at the Library of Congress, where five of her original songs are preserved in the American Folklife Center archives, and her songwriting has been recognized by the John Lennon Songwriting Contest.
Her song "Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)" has been streamed hundreds of thousands of times, tattooed on arms, sung in audition rooms, taught in classrooms, and quietly passed from one curious listener to another. Like much of Sumner's work, it doesn't simply tell a forgotten story—it asks why we forgot it in the first place, and who benefits from that forgetting.
Touring nationally, Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light has appeared everywhere from Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, and Earl Scruggs Music Festival to beloved listening rooms like Caffè Lena, Club Passim, and Sweetwater Music Hall. Whether on a festival stage or in a backyard house concert, the trio brings the same joyful musicianship, effortless chemistry, and spirit of discovery to every room. Audiences leave laughing, singing, and carrying the stories with them long after the drive home.
Video
Though Sumner has roots in both the bluegrass and classical worlds, this is true-blue singer-songwriter folk through and through, too: achingly clear, and wide open to the world, with twang and tenderness enough to carry us through the fire of an unusually difficult year
- Cover Lay Down
TOUR
FOLLOW
Contact
for booking inquiries: Ethan Robbins | Leap frog Booking
Ethanr@leapfrogbooking.com
