Grand Ole Opry member, CMA, ACM, and Grammy winner Jimmy Olander is one of the most-admired players in country music. As co-founder of Diamond Rio, his dedication has always been to the band rather than making a name for himself in Nashville studios, though he is also in-demand as a producer and collaborator who penned hit songs for Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, and a long list of others.

“It’s nice to be recognized for what you do,” he says. “My name pales in comparison to our brand, Diamond Rio, but I’m not caught up in who knows me. I like doing the work and I really like playing, writing, and recording. As long as I’m in a position to do that, I’m happy. I’d be doing this as a hobby if I wasn’t getting paid (laughs).”

Born in Minneapolis, young Jimmy’s life in music began on his father’s tenor banjo, which his dad used to study under Bill Pier, who played banjo in a studio orchestra. The Olander family briefly moved to Palos Verde, California, then suburban Detroit just before Jimmy started sixth grade. There, his father, a materials scientist, was part of a team that invented the catalytic converter for General Motors. Later, he worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. “Star Wars”) anti-missile system during the Reagan administration.

“Dad was a very interesting guy,” Olander said. “One day he came out of his lab with a piezo pickup that he’d made and attached inside my banjo. At the time, nobody had used a piezo on instruments. And one day years later, he told me, ‘Yeah, this guy, Linn, called me with questions…’ I was like, ‘Roger Linn? The LinnDrum guy?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s it.’”

Olander recently sat with VG to discuss his road to stardom, which began in earnest when Diamond Rio’s first-ever single, 1991’s “Meet in The Middle,” made them the first country music group to reach #1 with its debut. They’ve since charted a total of 20 Top 10 singles including 15 that reached the Top 5 and six more that hit #1 on the way to selling more than 6.8 million albums and accumulating more than a billion streams.

Known for playing (and singing) every note on every album, Diamond Rio has won six Vocal Group of the Year Awards (four Country Music Association and two Academy of Country Music), received 14 Grammy nominations, and in 2011 won Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album, for The Reason.

The group’s instrumental tracks, “Big,” “Appalachian Dream,” and “Poultry Promenade,” were written by Olander, and all received Grammy nominations for Best Country Instrumental Performance. In 2001, he received the ACM’s award for Guitar Player of the Year.

Earlier this year, Diamond Rio returned to the studio with two new members and his latest instrumental, “The Kick.”

Your first instrument was your dad’s banjo. Did you pick it up out of inherent curiosity, or because you wanted to please him?
Well, I did want to please my dad (chuckles). He was a loud, gregarious guy, and my brother was a star athlete and a star student, but I was an artist; I did a bunch of cartooning and illustrating, so “my stuff” was introspective and individual. Learning to play an instrument means sitting by yourself. But, while trying to please Dad, I legitimately fell in love with playing banjo and was playing eight to 10 hours a day; I remember dropping a needle on vinyl to learn Jack Hicks’ crazy melodic lick from Bill Monroe’s live recording of “Roll On, Buddy, Roll On.” I couldn’t get it, so I dropped the needle, dropped the needle, dropped the needle…

Was learning bluegrass tunes your primary motivation?
Yeah, I was heavy into bluegrass. I’d started playing when I was 11, then studied formally before I started giving lessons at a music store just before I turned 13, teaching intermediate and advanced students because I’d surpassed my teacher. She was a decent player, but I was working really hard, and when you’re a kid, you pick up stuff so fast. When I talk to other players, they have the same sort of background. Anybody who plays at a really high level usually started very young and their life had very little balance. I found balance later, so I’m not playing eight hours every day anymore. I play guitar every day, but for how long depends on what’s in front of me.

Is it always for work, or are there times you just want to feel it in your hands?
It’s usually for work. I’m a writer, so making things up is what I do. If I’m producing, writing, and being chief bottle washer, it’s a lot of work; coordinating schedules and the widget stuff is not my favorite, but it enables me to create and play. I still get excited.

How does the creative part work? Do you need an instrument in hand, or can a melody pop into your head while you walk through the grocery store?
I don’t usually find a melody popping into my head. I’m a bit more methodical, a bit more intellectual when I’m creating. If I’m just having fun, I may throw an amp up and play along with recordings. I was playing along with a Darin and Brooke Aldridge bluegrass record the other day because bluegrassers play fast, which helps me stay in shape.

After high school, you moved to Nashville to enroll at Belmont University and were still playing banjo until your steel-player friend Terry Wendt said, “You could get gigs if you played guitar?”
I was just turning 18 that first year at Belmont, after six years of teaching a full load of students and gigging on weekends. At college, I was no longer really playing music, and I didn’t learn much after two and a half years. I’d sit in with other players, and Terry and I would get together to pick – he was a real hotshot, and yeah, he talked me into grabbing the guitar. I owned a Telecaster, but had a hard time with it because the stuff I’d been playing banjo along to had Leon Rhodes on guitar with Ernest Tubb, or Eldon Shamblin – Western swing with a jazz component.

Your first touring gig was with Mel McDaniels. How did it happen?
My friend, Andy Reiss, was leaving Mel’s road band and got me in line to audition. I took an amp to Mel’s house and played a few of his record parts verbatim; because I was a banjo player, my transcription chops were really good and I could quickly learn anything a guitar player was doing on country radio, so I had no trouble regurgitating what was on Mel’s record. Of course, he thought I was the greatest player ever because I was doing it just like the record, but that’s all I could do (laughs). You couldn’t stick me in a blues jam! But, I also practiced and learned how to actually play the guitar.

After the Mel gig, you jumped aboard the Tennessee River Boys – a “show band” at the Opryland theme park. How did that go down?
I went to the Musicians Union and they were having a cattle-call audition. I’d already played in a band at Opryland with steel player Mel Deal, and then with Mel, so Tennessee River Boys felt beneath me. I auditioned and got the gig, but I remember thinking, “This is going in the wrong direction…” But what I didn’t realize was they were incredible musicians, writing original material, and had aspirations of getting a record deal. It wasn’t just a show band. So I committed, and right away they were encouraging me to do motifs for stuff we were working up, and also to write stuff. That was when I fell in love with writing and composing, and it eventually morphed into a record deal as Diamond Rio – all from a cattle call at the Union.

It took a few years for that deal to materialize. Did it seem like a long time?
Well, I was doing what I wanted to do – playing guitar with a band, creating. It was very idealistic, but we were progressing and I liked the guys. Now… before we signed, I did have to take my first day job, cutting grass in a two-man crew with our lead singer. The boss used to laugh, “I’ve got you down on Music Row, and you got to cut the Welk Building today, and then Lee and Melanie Greenwood’s place,” which was funny because Lee had called me when he needed a new guitar player. He offered a weekly salary that sounded like a million dollars because I was making almost nothing. But we had just cut some songs with [producer] Keith Stegall, and I told him, “Lee, it would be wrong of me to take the gig with you because if something happens for my band, I’d quit yours to go do that.” Two weeks later, there I was, cutting his grass (laughs). It was humbling, but we eventually lucked out on a deal with Arista’s label that was being opened in Nashville.

At the time – the late ’80s – there was a neo-traditional country scene happening with Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, and a few others. Was that a good thing as you helped shape Diamond Rio’s sound?
I was eating up all that stuff – Pete Anderson with Dwight and Richard Bennett with Steve, the stuff that sounded like Telecasters. I came from listening to the Buckaroos, learning Leon Rhodes riffs, and Bob Wills’ stuff.

My identity at that point was still as a hotshot banjo player trying to learn guitar and come up with something unique. I was listening to Steve Gibson, Fred Newell, Reggie Young, Brent Rowan, and going down to the Stagecoach to watch Brent Mason. I didn’t really know Brent, but there I was, with a Walkman tape recorder. He saw me and said, “Hey, are you a guitar player? Would you like me to put that in front of my amplifier?” He made it so easy for this nervous young player to get access to what he was doing. What a prince!

Mainstream country in the late ’80s and ’90s was overusing certain guitar tones that weren’t “traditional.” Did you ever drift that way?
When Diamond Rio was trying to get a record deal, we auditioned live for Tim Debois, the head of Arista Nashville, while doing an opening set for George Jones. At the time, I was using a ProCo Rat distortion for the solo in our cover of England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “Nights Are Forever Without You,” and after the show, our producer, Monty Powell, told me, “Yeah, never do that again.” (laughs) I took that to heart, so except for maybe two cuts I didn’t use high gain on recordings, even though high-gain solos were becoming prominent on country radio at the time.

So yeah, I’ve played a Telecaster with a single pickup and no distortion – just clean sounds – for 30-plus years, mostly with a pickup designed for me by Joe Glaser and Seymour Duncan that split the magnets so the bass strings got Alnico V, which sound spanky with less bass, and the treble strings are over Alnico II, which give a much smoother, compressed high-end. I did that to give myself a voice that could be differentiated from other players. Fast-forward 30-some years and my latest guitar has two amazing pickups made by Ron Ellis. Maybe it’s time to add a neck pickup (laughs).

Are there advantages to your having played banjo so well before grabbing a Tele?
In a way, it was a disadvantage; playing bluegrass banjo meant I came to electric with a heavy fret hand, which made the transition rough because I would always play sharp. String benders helped my left-hand technique develop to a level that most electric players take for granted, and make my bends more-precise.

How did you end up playing a guitar with two string benders?
Well, my buddy, Danny Schafer, was a Clarence White freak who played all the stuff Clarence did with Freddie Weller. He blew my mind with that bender stuff and showed me the first Parsons/White I’d ever seen. Then in the early ’80s, my friend, Mel Deal, who played steel in the original Tennessee River Boys, told me, “I’ve got a buddy who just moved to Nashville, Joe Glaser, and he’s making guitars with string benders.” He brought Joe to my house, and Joe told me about his idea for the double bender. My guitar and two others were the first he made in Nashville. He wasn’t looking to build a guitar for me, and I wasn’t looking for a double bender, but it presented itself, and I thought it would be the coolest thing ever (laughs).

Beyond building your main guitars, Joe helped resolve an inherent intonation problem on others.
Aside from filing and re-cutting fretboards, Joe’s guys help me with the transition from the wound fourth to the unwound third string on the electrics, which has always required me to tune the third a little flat so it wouldn’t be sharp at the second fret. I sat in the shop with Nick Drushel while, little by little, he applied the slightest compensation to the third string. In a sense, you’re moving the intonation of the third string’s frets flat, which can really mess up the overall tuning if its overdone.

I’ve done the same compensation to nuts on acoustic guitars because I play a lot in Drop D, where I often noticed the G note at the fifth fret was sharp. The tricky part is to make sure the fifth-fret G is in tune while not screwing up the F – D# when you’re drop-tuned – at the first fret. It gets a little dicey, but it’s well worth the effort because then you can concentrate on playing your instrument while not fighting its flaws at the same time.

When other players tell you about how you influenced them, is there a common element?
Not really. What pushes my buttons is, “I can always tell it’s you.” I’ve gone to great effort to create something unique, which comes from not only that I approach the guitar as a banjo player, but as a progressive banjo player following Bobby Thompson in Area Code 615 and the “Hee-Haw” staff band. My technique uses a lot of open strings, which makes it easier to play and creates a more-lagato sound, like a piano sustain pedal. You can hear that in the intro to “Meet In the Middle,” which is a fairly naked guitar with open strings and the double bender.

You still play quite a bit of banjo in Diamond Rio live shows…
I do, and as a matter of fact, a great banjo challenge for me is about to arrive again – the band’s Christmas show! I told my partners several years ago, while writing one of our Christmas shows, that I was going to work up The Nutcracker on the five-string as a feature. That soon morphed into a series of duets with Rio bandmates performing “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” “Dance of the Reed Pipes,” “Overture,” “The March,” and “The Russian Dance.” Needless to say, Tchaikovsky was not written for the five-string banjo (laughs).

How did your amp tone evolve?
My tone was pretty rough early on. Banjo players love their maple instruments, so of course I had Joe make me a Tele copy with a four-piece maple body, maple neck, and ebony fretboard. At the time, I was hanging around a bunch of steel players, so I was using a Peavey Session 400 with a 15″ speaker. It was sizzlingly bright and harsh – not a cocktail for great sound (laughs).

But I was always shopping for tone, and as soon as I got a blackface Pro, I was like, “Oh, that’s what a Tele is supposed to sound like.” Then, Joe built my first really good-sounding guitar – the Taxicaster, which has an alder body and a maple neck with rosewood. It was around the time the “Nashville system” was coming together, so it’s got a Bill Lawrence Hotrail humbucker in the middle, a Seymour Duncan Alnico II in the bridge, and I can’t remember what the neck pickup was, but with the Pro it sounded really cool. By that time, I was also more aware of how my hands could affect my tone.

How did you end up with the Matchless combo early on?
We’d signed with Arista and I was writing for Warner/Chappell Music, who paid me a stipend of about 300 bucks a week, but I told them I wanted it in a single check at the end of the year, and that was “mad money” to do my tax-deduction buying.

In 1989 or ’90, I was going to visit my folks in Michigan, and I stopped at a music shop right off the interstate – one of these old-school piano stores with a small collection of guitar stuff in the back. And there was a Matchless amp. I’d never heard of it; no reverb, nothing, but I plugged in my Taxicaster and it sounded great. It felt forgiving, and I could immediately get the sound I want – loud, soft, whatever. It pushed all my buttons. I was like, “I’ve got to have it.” It was 1,800 bucks or something, and I thought, “How can this amp nobody’s ever heard of cost so much?” But it left with me, and eventually, I ended up with four of them from that era because I play in stereo, and they’re really great.

Given that Diamond Rio formed with a focus on songwriting, lyrics, and harmonies, how did it end up recording a handful of instrumentals through the years?
Growing up, I listened to some vocal stuff, but all my passion was in instrumental music. In the golden era of country, artists would have their bands record instrumental music that was often featured on the artist’s recordings as well as their own TV shows – the Texas Troubadours, the Strangers, the Buckaroos, etc. I wanted to carry on that tradition, and found myself in a position to do it. At the time, it did seem like we were slipping one past the goalie.

Why isn’t there more session work on your resume´?
When I did sessions, I’d hear stuff like, “Can you do a Brent Mason thing on here? Can you be Brent Rowan? We need you to sound a little like Reggie.” I’d tell them, “You know who does Brent way better than me? A guy named Brent, and he lives right here. I just gave you my best.”

So it turned out I didn’t actually want to do sessions. I wanted to create stuff for myself with control over how it would sound. That was tough to swallow, because I thought I wanted to be a session player, and had great opportunities with amazing players, but it just was not my calling.

Was there specific inspiration or motivation behind the first new Diamond Rio song in 13 years being a hot-picking instrumental?
It didn’t make sense at this stage in our career to focus on the traditional release strategy – singles to country radio, hoping we’d still get attention. You get to a point where the new kids take over… which is not to say that we wouldn’t love to have another hit, but our strategy was focused on touring our 25-plus years of hits and releasing new music for fans on our label, Rio Hot Records, like I Made It.

“The Kick” was about accomplishing goals and introducing new members. I asked our new drummer, Micah Schweinsberg, “What would you like to do?” and he told me, “I want to be a part of creating something that Mike Clute records.” And I talked to our other new member, Carson McKee, and she said, “I want to always be growing. I want to write.” I told them, “Okay, let’s write an instrumental to introduce you guys.” For a long time, I was thinking, “Carson is a kickass fiddle player, so this has got to be a fiddle thing.” We also needed to do something fresh. During the Covid lockdown, I learned some new harmonic concepts by studying film scoring; I’ve always liked to mash-up genres, and I wanted to combine the fiddle-tune structure with scoring harmonization. The trick with having a high-concept musical plan is to avoid anything formulaic or that sounds like math. I was super-pleased with how it turned out, and we snuck a few cool things in there.

Is there a full album in the works, or are you sticking with singles, maybe an EP?
I’m not crazy about the singles thing; I like to listen to the artistry of a whole project. I don’t get that with a single, and a lot of times they’re over-mastered, sonically, to sound like radio. But I’ll contradict myself when I say we are releasing only singles at the moment.

In your first VG interview in 2001, you mentioned having a few songs done for a solo instrumental album. So far, it hasn’t been a thing.
It’s interesting you bring that up, because I resurrected that to be the next thing for Diamond Rio – a spoken word/instrumental project called Mabel and the Preacher.

That instrumental project started to sound like so many guitar albums I didn’t care for, where there’s a cool riff and it’s doubled before the band comes in and plays a riff four times, then everybody solos before they spin around and quote the riff at the end. Then they’ll do another tune in half-time and a change of key. We’ve all heard those records. So, I took a cue from Peter and the Wolf, which I first heard as a kid in elementary school, with characters played by a French horn and other instruments.

I’d written a short story about a fictional town in North Carolina that had trouble holding onto preachers, and I thought, “What if I write a song for a set of characters?” I figured it could be interesting, and sure enough, what I came up with were actual songs, not extended riffs.

Anyway, as we were finishing “The Kick,” I found those old sound files, and told the band, “I think it’s going to be better if we do all this together.” And everybody’s into it. But, before another instrumental, we’ll do a vocal piece – a duet with Carson and our longtime lead singer Marty Roe.

Working long hours and touring are physically demanding tasks, but a big part of your life involves physical conditioning.
Yeah. I do a full gym workout every day. During Covid, I worked up a routine where I can knock out 500 pushups in 48 minutes and it doesn’t feel Herculean. And I’m running ultra marathons now; the 50K is my current distance and I’m ramping up for another.

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When he’s not creating music, Jimmy Olander combines philanthropy with his love of fitness. Co-founder of Team Rio, for 10 years he ran the St. Jude Country Music Marathon, raising more than $500,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Middle Tennessee and other charities. The Minnie Pearl Humanitarian Award honored him for his work individually and as part of Diamond Rio.

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This article originally appeared in VG’s November 2023 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.