‘One Night on Sugar Hill’ Concert to Honor Sugar Hill Records’ Barry Poss: ‘We All Owe Him Our Careers’
Billboard · · g4464368
On Nov. 5, artists will gather in Durham, North Carolina to celebrate the life, career and legacy of late Sugar Hill Records exec Barry Poss.
Eight months ago, Bluegrass Hall of Famer and 14-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas had an idea to bring artists together for a concert to honor the late bluegrass music champion, Sugar Hill Records’ longtime owner and co-founder Barry Poss, who died at age 79 in May 2025.
“Everybody kept saying yes,” Douglas tells Billboard . “Every one of them knew Barry, and this is our wake of sorts, as well, because not everybody got to say goodbye, and we all owe him our careers.”
Poss was known for launching, propelling and shaping Sugar Hill Records into a leading force in bluegrass, roots and Americana music and for helping bring scores of artists including Douglas, Ricky Skaggs, Hot Rize, Chris Thile and Nickel Creek into wider acclaim.
On Nov. 5, a who’s-who of bluegrass and roots artists will gather at Durham, North Carolina’s The Carolina Theatre to pay tribute to Poss’s visionary career, with One Night On Sugar Hill: Celebrating the Life of Barry Poss & the Legacy of Sugar Hill Records.
The towering lineup of “yeses” includes Hot Rize (Nick Forster, Tim O’Brien, Peter Wernick and Bryan Sutton), Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Sarah Jarosz, Robert Earl Keen, Daniel Kimbro, Doyle Lawson, Russell Moore, Mollie O’Brien, Quicksilver (a reunion with Lawson and Jimmy Haley), Peter Rowan, Kristin Scott Benson, Skaggs, Ed Snodderly, Bryan Sutton, The Red Clay Ramblers’ Jim Watson, The Whites’ Sharon Skaggs and Cheryl White, and Robin and Linda Williams.
Poss, a Brantford, Ontario, native, became immersed in roots music while studying sociology at Duke University, notably after attending the Union Grove Fiddlers’ Convention. Early on, he worked for Virginia label County and Rebel Records, before forming Sugar Hill Records with Dave Freeman in 1978. Poss gained full control of the label in 1980. Poss continued spearheading the label until selling it to Welk Music Group in 1998 (Concord Music currently owns Sugar Hill Records, as a division of Rounder).
Poss and Sugar Hill played an essential role in introducing the world to the talents of artists including Nickel Creek, Chris Thile, Boone Creek, Skaggs, Douglas and more. The label also recorded influential bluegrass artists including Doc Watson, Tim O’Brien, The Infamous Stringdusters, Larry Cordle, The Seldom Scene, New Grass Revival, Bryan Sutton, Doyle Lawson, The Del McCoury Band and more. Over the years, Sugar Hill has also released albums by Americana acts including Chris Hillman, Robert Earl Keen, and Guy Clark, as well as country artists Dolly Parton (who recorded acclaimed bluegrass projects such as the Grammy-winning 2001 project The Grass Is Blue ), Lee Ann Womack, Connie Smith and Willie Nelson.
Under Poss’s tenure, Sugar Hill earned five Grammy trophies for best bluegrass album (including in 1994, when the Nashville Bluegrass Band’s Waitin’ For The Hard Times To Go took home the accolade).
“The fact that Sugar Hill Records has been such an important part of bluegrass music history is huge,” said Adam Engelhardt, executive director at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and a member of the IBMA board. “So many Grammy-winning projects, and really bluegrass music is very traditional in a sense, but Barry was so great about finding diamonds in the rough, musicians who would take it the next step and expand what bluegrass already was — almost genre-changing as far as really boosting the industry and making it compete with country music and rock-n-roll and all of the other things that were happening in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Just weeks ago, Poss was inducted posthumously into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, and Poss was also recently inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. Poss had helped assemble the International Bluegrass Music Association and was a founding board member of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
“When you look at all the artists he’s had an impact on, from Ricky Skaggs to Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas, the list goes on and on,” Engelhardt says. “So many of these artists are already in the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, and it’s perfectly fitting now that he can join them [in the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame] as a behind-the-scenes guy who pretty much built all of their careers.”
The Nov. 5 lineup will also feature Douglas reuniting with Boone Creek alumni Skaggs and Wes Golding (Boone Creek founding member Terry Baucom passed away in 2023, and banjoist Scott Benson will spearhead banjo duties during the performance). Boone Creek’s album One Way Track , released in 1978 on Sugar Hill, was the group’s second and final album.
“I’m excited for it,” Douglas says. “We made records together in the late ‘70s, and we’re still finding songs that were lost since 1977, or something like that. I found a cassette tape the other day and found another track that we’d totally lost. I just found a rough mix of it and I’m going to try to get the tape taken care of, so we can hear what’s on it.”
Following his work with Boone Creek, Skaggs released Sweet Temptation , an album of traditional country-leaning music, through Sugar Hill in 1979, before later releasing albums including a joint effort between Sugar Hill and Epic, Don’t Cheat In Our Hometown , which, among other Skaggs albums, helped lead country music’s 1980s neo-traditional movement.
With such a star-studded lineup of artists who have been part of the Sugar Hill story, Douglas expects the concert to be filled with unique musical pairings: “I do have some things up my sleeve, like getting Sharon and Cheryl White to sing with Mollie O’Brien — that would be beautiful. Russell Moore is coming in to sing with Ricky Skaggs, and Russell’s just beside himself. Ricky is such a hero to him and that’ll be the first time they’ve ever sung together. And Robert Earl [Keen], he’s just a big party on wheels, anyway. But it’s all Sugar Hill music, music that was on the label.”
In keeping with Poss’s legacy of championing new artists, a portion of the proceeds from the concert will support a new fund aimed at creating an annual concert to honor Poss by showcasing new artists.
“When you look at his Sugar Hill record, when he was the record label owner, all of the artists he was pushing were new artists at the time — Nashville Bluegrass Band, Hot Rize, all artists that he took a chance on,” Engelhardt says. “So it’s great to see this concert will be doing the same thing. And hopefully, do it every year and it will always be promoting new artists, artists that need someone to take a chance on them and support them, and that was what Barry did.”
Douglas and Engelhardt nod to artists such as the Crying Uncle Bluegrass Band, as well as recent IBMA new artist of the year winner Mason Via, as stellar talents already making waves in the bluegrass scene.
“They are continuing what we started a long time ago, just this music,” Douglas says. “The boundaries are wide and we always come back to the roots of the music.”