The chamber-folk ensemble of the Wolaver family.

A chamber-folk ensemble of six classically-trained siblings, born at Juilliard during Annie's freshman year, founded with their parents Bill and Robin in 2003, and named for their great-grandmother. Sixteen albums across more than two decades. Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry, the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Three public television specials. A working artistic life carried by the same six siblings and their parents from the beginning.

The Band

The Annie Moses Band was born at Juilliard.

Annie was in her freshman year. Alex and Benjamin were students at the Pre-College Division. The family had been performing together as children for years — corporate work at the Opryland Hotel, the National Boy Scouts convention, the IBM National convention — but the ensemble that would carry the Annie Moses Band name took shape during the years in New York. The earliest performances were a few local open mics in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut — The Town Crier, Bodles Opera House — to standing ovations and the quick realization that a seven-piece classically-trained ensemble was not what an open mic night had in mind.

The turn came through an invitation. Bill's connections in the music-publishing industry led to a forty-five-minute set at a J&J Music conference of three hundred music ministers in New York City, 2001. The set produced a standing ovation and, in its wake, requests that consolidated into a thirty-three-city tour across the United States, culminating in a performance at Adrian Rogers' Bellevue Baptist in Memphis where the Band filmed its first live concert DVD. That October the family was invited to perform at Gaither Music's PraiseGathering arena event in Indianapolis. From PraiseGathering, the Band began touring full-time — up to a hundred concerts a year — and the family moved back to Nashville to make the touring life sustainable.

Several Nashville labels noticed. Annie was offered development deals on the condition that she leave the family band behind and work as a solo vocal artist — the early-2000s commercial template for a young female vocalist. She declined. The Band recorded Eden, their first commercial release and their first project made in professional Nashville studios, and Strings Magazine published a feature on the ensemble titled “Go Down, Moses” by Bob Doerschuk surrounding the release.

In the meeting at Provident that would lead to the Band's first major-label deal, then-president Terry Hemmings asked Annie what her dream for her career was.

“I hope that at the end of our career we can look back and see a thousand churches who have opened Arts Academies because of our legacy.”

The Annie Moses Foundation, the Annie Moses Summer Music Festival, the Conservatory of Annie Moses, and the Annie Moses Institute all came later. In retrospect the family understands that exchange — a young woman in a label boardroom, before any of those things existed — as the first crystallization of the vision that would eventually become the Institute.

The Annie Moses Band in its early years — The early years

The Members

Six siblings and their parents.

Annie Dupré, Alex Wolaver, and Benjamin Wolaver were all classically trained at Juilliard, while Camille DaSilva, Gretchen Wolaver, and Jeremiah Wolaver studied with acclaimed music teachers at the Manhattan School of Music and Belmont respectively. The co-founding parents are Bill Wolaver, the Band's veteran composer and primary arranger, and Robin Wolaver, the family's songwriter.

Alex Wolaver

FOUNDER & DIRECTOR

Annie Wolaver Dupre

FOUNDER & DIRECTOR OF THE CONSERVATORY OF ANNIE MOSES

Benjamin Wolaver

FOUNDER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

FOUNDER, PRODUCER, ARTIST

The Recordings

Sixteen records across more than two decades.

Eden

2005 · ManAlive Records

The Band's first commercial release and their first recording made in professional Nashville studios. The record marked the beginning of the catalogue carried on the family's own label, ManAlive, and was the subject of a Strings Magazine feature that introduced the Band to the wider classical and crossover audience.

Bethlehem, House of Bread

2006 · ManAlive Records

The Band's breakout Christmas project. The record coined many of what would become the family's signature arrangements; their arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” was the moment the Band found its signature sound. Recorded independently in the earlier year and released commercially the following.

Always Morning Somewhere

2006 · ManAlive Records

The Band's third independent commercial release, taking its title from a song about the eternally renewing mercies of God — “his mercies are new every morning.” The record was where the Band spread its creative wings: Bill Wolaver's cinematic instrumental “First Light” alongside Alex's debut as lead vocalist on “Halo of the Moon.”

Through the Looking Glass

2007 · ManAlive Records

A creative height for the Band, produced in collaboration with industry legend Michael Omartian. The Band debuted three songs from the project at a GMA Week showcase that year — the showcase that led directly to the Band's first major-label deal with Provident Music Group.

Christmas Bright & Beautiful

2007 · ManAlive Records

Recorded in one week at a small intimate studio in downtown Franklin, Tennessee — a concept project of entirely instrumental Christmas arrangements, made in a flurry of four creative days with Bill Wolaver arranging in the studio lounge and bringing charts hot off the press into the main room for recording. The record produced the Band's signature trilogy of “Sussex Carol,” “What Child Is This,” and “We Three Kings,” along with their bluegrass-flavored “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”

This Glorious Christmas

2008 · Sony BMG / ManAlive Records

The Band's first release on Provident, following the Through the Looking Glass showcase the year before. The album debuted in the top ten of Billboard's Classical Crossover chart. Much of the material had been originally written for Bethlehem, House of Bread and Christmas Bright & Beautiful, re-recorded for the major-label release with several new songs added.

Christmas with the Annie Moses Band

2009 · ManAlive Records / Dream Journey

The Band's first public television special, produced in Nashville. PBS picked up distribution, Provident released the CD and DVD, and the special broke the record for debut-artist airtime on PBS. The broadcast introduced the Annie Moses Band to a national audience that has remained with them since.

Pilgrims & Prodigals

2012 · ManAlive Records

The Band's second public television special, released in partnership with APT, and the record at the center of a remarkable year: the Band's debuts at Carnegie Hall and the Grand Ole Opry, both in 2012. Pilgrims & Prodigals reached #11 on Billboard's Bluegrass Albums chart and #6 on the Heatseekers Northeast chart, and remains an early major statement of the Americana-and-classical synthesis the Band would develop further across the records that followed.

Christmas Loves Company

2013 · ManAlive Records

The fourth Christmas record, where the Band opened collaborative doors more widely than on the seasonal records before it. Joshua Carswell appears on three of the songs, and the Hall Sisters — early mentors of the Annie Moses Summer Music Festival, then known as the Fine Arts Summer Academy — contribute their voices to the record as well.

American Rhapsody

2015 · Warner Classics

The Band's signature Rhapsody in Bluegrass — a fiddle-driven arrangement pairing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with “I've Been Working on the Railroad” — was conceived in the years before this album and became its anchor. Following the Band's performance of their hit Christmas material at the Opry at the Ryman in December 2013, Pete Fisher shepherded the Band's next project through to a collaboration with Ruby Marchand at the Grammy Foundation, leading to the deal with Warner Classics and the 2015 release of American Rhapsody. The Band debuted the album live on the Grand Ole Opry, including their fiddle-infused mashup of the second movement of Dvořák's American Quartet and the Irish reel “Musical Priest.” Across fourteen tracks the record reaches for the full sweep of American musical tradition — Gershwin reimagined, Copland's “Hoedown” streamlined for the Band's forces, sensitive treatments of “Shenandoah” and Stephen Foster's “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and original compositions that move from the prairie to the West to the railroad.

The Art of the Love Song

2016 · Warner Classics / Rhino

The Band's third public television special, filmed at the Grand Ole Opry House in 2015 and released commercially the following year. The special was Emmy-nominated for the Southeast for Best Music Special. The record turned the Band's focus from American landscape to American songbook — the standards, the ballads, the inheritance of song.

O Holy Night

2018 · ManAlive Records

The Band's iconic arrangement of “O Holy Night” — first released as one of two added tracks on the 2017 deluxe reissue of This Glorious Christmas — became the centerpiece of this 2018 record, the Band's most recent Christmas project.

Tales From My Grandpa's Pulpit

2021 · Gaither Music Group

The Band's debut on Gaither Music Group, drawn from the family's musical and spiritual heritage — a grandfather who was both preacher and deputy sheriff, and whose example helped shape the Annie Moses Band. The album combines new songs with hymns and traditional country anthems, including “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “How Can I Keep From Singing,” and the title track “In My Grandpa's Pulpit.”

Under The Tree of Life

Release beginning fall 2026

The Band's new sacred-orchestral work, more than a decade in the writing. The studio release begins fall 2026 — more below.

The Band's earliest independent releases — Legacy (2001), Message In A Baby (2002), and Cloud 9 (2002) — predate the catalogue carried on KIN and are out of release.

The New Work

Under The Tree of Life.

For more than a decade, the Band has been writing and composing the music of Under The Tree of Life. Original settings of sacred texts, with the music primarily composed and orchestrated by Bill Wolaver, the work has developed through the family's life across years of touring, recording, and performance.

The first single from the project, “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree,” was released in December 2018.

The full work was premiered live on November 6, 2023 — the Band's twentieth anniversary — at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington, D.C. The premiere featured Jim Caviezel as narrator and Clay Walker in a special appearance, with a 100-voice symphony orchestra and choir assembled from across the country.

The studio release of Under The Tree of Life begins in fall 2026.

Under The Tree of Life — project artwork

Performance & Public Record

The breadth of the American musical tradition.

The Annie Moses Band has performed in the three concert halls that, taken together, represent the breadth of American musical tradition — the classical concert hall, the country and Americana tradition, and the tradition of major sacred and orchestral work.

Carnegie Hall

The Band debuted at Carnegie in 2012, the same year as the release of Pilgrims & Prodigals and the Grand Ole Opry debut. The Band returned to Carnegie on January 22, 2018, to Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, presenting their self-produced Rhapsody in Bluegrass program, conducted by Jeff Bennett — a long-time friend and conductor for the Band's major-venue programs, who also appeared as guest artist — with guest vocalist Joshua Carswell, a Fellow of the Annie Moses Institute, faculty at the Conservatory, and recording artist on KIN.

The Grand Ole Opry

The Band's Opry debut, also in 2012, produced a standing ovation. The Band has since returned to the Opry repeatedly, including the Opry-at-the-Ryman appearance in December 2013 that led to the American Rhapsody deal with Warner Classics, and the 2015 live debut of American Rhapsody on the Opry stage.

The Kennedy Center Concert Hall

The Band's premiere of Under The Tree of Life on November 6, 2023 — the twentieth anniversary concert.

Public Television

Three public television specials across the Band's recording life. Christmas with the Annie Moses Band (2009, PBS) broke the record for debut-artist airtime on PBS. Pilgrims & Prodigals (2012, APT) followed. The Art of the Love Song (2015 filming / 2016 commercial release, PBS), filmed at the Grand Ole Opry House, was nominated for an Emmy for Best Music Special.

Press & Coverage

Substantive coverage across the Band's recording life, including Strings Magazine (the “Go Down, Moses” feature by Bob Doerschuk surrounding the release of Eden; a later feature on American Rhapsody), CCM Magazine, The Tennessean, Dallas Morning News, Christianity Today, and Music Row Magazine. Music videos for American Rhapsody premiered on The Wall Street Journal and Southern Living.

International

The Band has toured Europe and Asia in addition to extensive United States touring. In 2009, the Band raised funds to travel to North Korea on behalf of an NGO, alongside Casting Crowns. The week was covered by MSNBC, whose coverage incorrectly reported that the Band had been paid for the trip; in fact, the family raised the funds and traveled at their own expense. While in Pyongyang, Annie and the Band recorded a Korean song at the state recording studio, on two-inch tape and a Harrison console.

The Work

Repertoire and sound.

The Annie Moses Band occupies an unusual position in American music: a string-forward ensemble with Juilliard-trained core musicians whose repertoire moves freely between classical idiom, Appalachian and bluegrass tradition, the Great American Songbook, and sacred music. The fusion is not a survey or a crossover gesture but a single working vocabulary. Fiddle lines carry the rhetorical phrasing of conservatory violin; vocal arrangements draw on Southern gospel and shape-note harmony as readily as on art-song. The result is closer in spirit to the older American practice — the camp meeting, the parlor, the chautauqua — in which sacred and secular, folk and formal, were performed by the same musicians on the same evening, than to the genre-segregated landscape of the modern record industry.

The trajectory of the last three albums traces a deepening of that vocabulary. American Rhapsody (Warner Classics, 2015) is the Band's most explicit treatment of the Americana canon, drawing on Stephen Foster, the spirituals, and the fiddle tradition, but arranged with the harmonic density and orchestral scale of the symphonic literature — a record that sits closer to Copland and Gershwin than to contemporary acoustic music. The Art of the Love Song (2016), filmed at the Grand Ole Opry House for PBS, turns toward the standards and the romantic ballad, foregrounding vocal craft and the long melodic line; it is the most intimate of the recent records and the one that most clearly displays the Band's connection to the Songbook tradition. Tales from My Grandpa's Pulpit is the sacred counterpart — drawing on the hymnody, gospel, and preaching cadences of the family's own inheritance, and treating that material with the same compositional seriousness the Band brings to the secular repertoire.

What runs through all three is a refusal of the false choice between rigor and accessibility. The Juilliard training is audible — in intonation, in phrase shape, in the willingness to write counterpoint where a simpler arrangement would serve — but it is in service of music that remains rooted in vernacular American forms. Under The Tree of Life, premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2023, represents the most ambitious gathering of these threads to date: a sacred-orchestral work conceived for full symphony and chorus, drawing on the Band's full stylistic range and pointing toward a larger-scale compositional ambition the earlier records anticipated but did not yet require.

Listen

The catalogue lives on KIN.

The Band's full catalogue lives on KIN, the family's consumer media platform. Under The Tree of Life will release there beginning fall 2026.

Listen on KIN Browse the full catalogue →

Through the Years

Two decades, in pictures.

The Annie Moses Band performing at Carnegie Hall — Carnegie Hall · 2012

Portraits of the Annie Moses Band — The ensemble

The Annie Moses Band in concert — On stage

The Annie Moses Band — Western Odyssey — Western Odyssey

Benjamin and Alex Wolaver — Benjamin & Alex

The Annie Moses Band on the Pacific coast — Pacific Northwest

Jeremiah Wolaver in concert — Jeremiah, in concert

Support the Band

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Touring, recording, and the concert films on KIN — the Band's work reaches further because patrons carry the costs tickets never cover. Help send this music to the next town, and the next generation.

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The Wider Family of Work

The Annie Moses Band is the first of several artistic enterprises the family has built across two decades. KIN is the family's consumer media platform, founded when the family launched The Wonderful World of Benjamin Cello. The Annie Moses Foundation and The Annie Moses Institute — together comprising the Annie Moses Summer Music Festival, the Conservatory of Annie Moses, and the broader educational work the family has been building since the 1,000-churches conversation in that Provident meeting — carry forward the vocation in nonprofit form. The Band came first; the rest grew alongside.

Explore KIN About the Institute The Festival The Conservatory

The Annie Moses Band silhouetted at sunset