Andy Dunnigan makes his own name in music

Last name be damned, Andy Dunnigan was going to be a baseball player, and as a kid growing up in Whitefish it was going pretty well.

Dunnigan pitched and played shortstop, and was good enough to spend half a year in Arizona with a traveling summer league team. When he came home he played American Legion baseball for his hometown Glacier Twins, but it was there that the shaggy teenager ran into a problem.

“They wanted me to cut my hair,” Dunnigan recalled. “And I said [forget] it and I started playing guitar.”

His choice, to play guitar, was not made simply out of rebellion. He was joining the family business, making music the way his father — prolific and popular Flathead Valley singer-songwriter John Dunnigan — had been doing for decades.

More than 10 years later, the now 29-year-old Andy has wound up in a place that serves his surname well and has exploded out of his father’s shadow with his burgeoning Missoula-based band, The Lil’ Smokies. The group has piled up awards in recent years, is releasing an album later in 2017, and Andy and The Lil’ Smokies are criss-crossing the country with a packed performance schedule reminiscent of his dad in his younger days.

And, perhaps as a sign of commitment to his craft, perhaps to save money on shampoo or perhaps out of simple vanity, he’s even cut his hair.

JOHN DUNNIGAN, despite his success, never pushed his kids into music. Plus, Andy said, “My dad likes baseball as much as he likes James Taylor.”

To counteract his late start, Andy quickly became obsessed with learning the guitar, something he credits partially to his father’s early indifference.

“To some degree I wish he would have put it on me,” Andy said. “But I came to it so organically and so naturally; there was such a ferocious appetite that I had because I came to it on my own.

“Perhaps if I had been forced into it earlier I wouldn’t have had the thirst that I had.”

The younger Dunnigan committed himself fully — “I became a monk about it,” he said — and spent every free moment practicing and taking impromptu lessons from the musician down the hall.

“It was like having a guitar instructor in your house,” Andy said of John.

Later, Andy even taught himself how to play the Dobro, a unique resophonic slide guitar that is his primary instrument these days.

Even as consumed by music as he was, Dunnigan still went to the University of Montana after graduating from Whitefish High School to study as an English major, relegating music to the back-burner.

It didn’t take.

“I would hide out in the (music) building after hours and play all night,” he said. “I was playing music way more than I was in the English department.”

One night in 2009, at a party, Dunnigan met a few other musicians and they all sang songs and jammed together into the morning. Soon after they started meeting up at a garage in town to play, then picked up their first few gigs playing bluegrass shows around Missoula. That band, The Lil’ Smokies, was the first one Dunnigan had ever been part of.

Dunnigan left UM before earning his degree, in part to pursue a career in music, and in the beginning he and his bandmates hung out in Missoula and gigged more as a hobby than a career. The Lil’ Smokies weren’t expecting to hit back then, and after a few years he left the band, and Montana, to “chase a girl” to Northern California.

Things didn’t work out as he had hoped there so Dunnigan came back, leaving his job at a Whole Foods deli counter to return to the Big Sky. He took his days in California and turned them into a positive, using the whole situation to help him take the next step in his career.

“I moved back and just kind of felt the urge to start singing,” he said. “The only thing I was missing was singing; and when I started singing and writing (music) I had a lot to say.”

Dunnigan rejoined The Lil’ Smokies on both Dobro and vocals, and used his experiences — in California and studying as an English major — to write the band a bevy of original music and lyrics. The songs were a hit and the first hint that something was working came in 2013, when The Lil’ Smokies won the Northwest String Summit Band Competition in Oregon.

“That was kind of the first indicator that maybe we’re not delusional after all,” Dunnigan said. “People are responding to this.”

Two years later they won another band competition, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado, and in 2016 they picked up the International Bluegrass Music Association Momentum Award for best band. As the honors piled up the group signed with an agent, partnered with a management company and accepted a rigorous touring schedule, one that included nearly 200 dates in 2016. Their schedule in 2017 is just as busy.

“I’m here in Montana for two days and then we leave for the rest of the month,” Dunnigan said late last week from his home in Missoula. “I think we’re all starting to realize the huge sacrifice it is, but we’re so grateful for the experience. It truly is the greatest adventure ever.”

The hectic touring schedule contributed in part to a major lineup change for the band in 2016, but later this year the retooled Lil’ Smokies will release an album, “Changing Shades,” recorded earlier this year at Whitefish’s SnowGhost Music.

A second evolution for the Lil’ Smokies has happened musically. The group started out playing mostly bluegrass; after all they look awfully bluegrass with Dunnigan on Dobro, Scott Parker on upright bass, Matt Cornette on banjo, Jake Simpson on fiddle and Matt Rieger on guitar.

Now, Dunnigan said the band might still speak the language of bluegrass but is working hard to carve out its own distinctive sound.

“It’s hard not to be a bluegrass band when the elephant in the room is you are a bluegrass band,” he said. “We do play traditional bluegrass music and we like doing that but we’re trying to take a genre and put a new spin on it.

“I think bluegrass is in its adolescence.”

The Lil’ Smokies will be perform at the Northwest String Summit in Oregon on July 13 before embarking on trips to Virginia, New York, Colorado, Utah and Illinois before the end of the month.

For a complete tour schedule and more information, visit www.thelilsmokies.com.