Grand Rapids, Michigan
Mark Lavengood
Dobro player, songwriter and producer. Michigan made him and the road kept him — fifteen years of it, regional to national to a few rooms an ocean away.
The slide is the tell — somewhere between a hymn and a harp, a sound that doesn't ask permission before it goes straight at the thing you'd rather not say out loud. Mark is a past Rockygrass Dobro Competition champion and has played the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Stagecoach, Celtic Connections in Glasgow and Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble in Woodstock, with years in Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys along the way.
He has recorded with, toured with and sat in with Billy Strings, Michael Cleveland, Sierra Hull, Greensky Bluegrass, Kitchen Dwellers, Amy Helm, Anders Osborne and Lindsay Lou. Billy Strings plays on Mark's album No Part of Nothin', and Mark sits in with Billy often. In August 2026 he hosted Billy's inaugural Ionia Freak Fair and sat in with him — about 28,000 people — where Billy introduced him as "Huggy Bear." It stuck.
Back home he's the co-founder and ambassador of Smiling Acres Music Festival in Trufant, Michigan — a weekend-before-the-Fourth-of-July gathering of friends that grew into a festival. He runs the Bear Den, his own studio north of Grand Rapids, where much of the new album Wake Up was made, and produces records for Bear Mark Productions and collaborators including Lady Ace Boogie, Major Murphy and El Príncipe Idiota.
He teaches, too: Music With Mark is his online dobro school — the Complete Dobro Module Series, beginner through advanced, filmed at the Bear Den.
And when the lights come up he's still at the merch table, last one talking. That part isn't an afterthought. That's the job. His fans are the Denizens.