Gary Eller

Gary Eller has played American roots music since childhood and has played banjo for over fifty years. He was born and raised in West Virginia but has lived most of his life in the American West. After a thirty year career in nuclear science and engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he retired to Pickles Butte near Nampa, Idaho in 2004.

Over the years, Gary has played in countless bands in West Virginia, Ohio, New Mexico, Washington and Idaho. He has won or placed in banjo and band competitions in several states. Currently, Gary is the banjo player for the popular regional progressive bluegrass band Chicken Dinner Road, a board member of the National Old Time Fiddle Contest and director of the Weiser Banjo Contest, Weiser Banjo Contest, and various musical workshops at Weiser. He also is the director of the Idaho Songs Project, whose primary mission is to find, document, interpret and preserve songs written before the radio era (before 1923) about early Idaho's people, places and events. To date, Gary has documented over two hundred forgotten early Idaho songs and has published over a dozen topically arranged interpretive booklets with audio CDs based on these songs.