Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light

Winners of the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Band Contest, Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light are a Boston acoustic trio built on close three-part harmony and Sumner's original songs. Sumner was previously a guitarist and one of two primary songwriters in Twisted Pine. The trio's album Heartless Things includes "Head East," featured in a Bluegrass Situation session, and Sumner's song "Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)" has been streamed hundreds of thousands of times and taught in classrooms. Songs draw on labor history, folklore, and the American West.