Rainy Miatke Interview

Rainy Miatke’s journey from rural southern Oregon to Nashville has garnered quite the recognition along the way. She began in the family band Rainy and the Rattlesnakes on mandolin with her sister Lela on the fiddle and dad Ray on guitar. In case you missed some highlights more recently, she auditioned for Sister Sadie on the Grand Ole Opry and is now a full time member. She received the IBMA Momentum Award Instrumentalist of the Year 2025. As part of Sister Sadie she even put down the mandolin and played Telecaster on stage with Patty Loveless. She is a multi-instrumentalist with a love for music that is propelling her career. 

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Read the exclusive interview below, by Brandon Nelson:

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest and maybe some of the contrast that you see in the music scene back east in North Carolina and Nashville?

Yeah, absolutely. It has been an interesting journey and I think that growing up in southern Oregon has really shaped so much of who I am. As a person and as a musician, I just really, deeply love this place and the land here and I just feel very connected to it.  You know, the forests and the rivers that have informed some of my songwriting and the music that I love. I've always been really inspired by some of the west coast musical heroes that I grew up with, like Laurie Lewis, for example, and so many amazing Bay Area musicians. There's not a huge bluegrass scene in southern Oregon but, there's small little pockets here and there. I really feel lucky to have grown up going to music camps in California and just sort of developed a community. People would come from all over to go to those camps, but it really sort of embodied to me what the West Coast Bluegrass Community feels like. Fortunately, a lot of those people who would come out to the camp, The Shasta string summit was one of the main ones that I grew up going to, a lot of those people now live in Nashville. So, in many ways, my community does kind of feel like one big community or different facets of a similar thing. Out in Nashville, I actually feel like there's a lot of crossover and similarity from my childhood, but the music in the southern Oregon bluegrass scene definitely feels different. I feel honored to be able to get to be a part of it, definitely a musical tradition with deep roots. In Asheville where I was in college, I learned so much about the roots of Appalachian old time music and I just felt like being a part of something bigger and something that runs a little deeper. Even though ultimately it is just, people who love this music. 

Before we move too far from the Northwest. Who were the Pacific Northwest teachers that you worked with along the way? 

Glenn Freese (Foxfire/Siskiyou Summit), in terms of mandolin, was very much my main mandolin teacher as I was starting out as a kid. I was seeing him every week and taking lessons, he's fantastic. I just really appreciate all that he's done for me and my music. There was no one else that was regular but I did take some jazz guitar lessons for a while with Ed Dunsavage, he's awesome. Um, that was more in my teens. I just love music and I feel I've just delved down into so many different styles. That was really formative for me as well. I think it’s helped give me a broader context for my musicianship in general. I definitely had a lot of teachers from these camps in the Shasta Strings Summit that I would go see occasionally for lessons. Jody Stecker lives in the Bay Area and he's such a hero of mine. I would occasionally go to his house for a lesson. Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum have just been such supporters of me and my music and mentors of mine for a long time. So occasionally I would go get a lesson from them, and Tom has been a big mandolin influence of mine. So you know, up and down the west coast there have been a few people. In the Rogue Valley, mostly Glenn and Ed have been actual teachers of mine. 

You went to Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina.  A lot of musicians do not finish when their careers take off. Did you finish college and if so, what did you study?

I did, yes. So my degree ended up being in music, shocker. I also studied expressive arts therapy. Which is basically, for me, was music therapy and that was also a big part of my education there. I did end up finishing college, I graduated this past May 2025. There were times when I was touring with Sister Sadie and it was challenging to say the least. I thought about dropping out, but when you've come that far I felt incredibly attached to the idea of finishing what I had started, because college was such a journey for me in general.

How has college and finishing your degree helped you moving forward with your journey and Sister Sadie? 

I think that it would have been easier in terms of Sister Sadie. It would have been much easier for me to drop out and just move to Nashville, sooner rather than later. There was just so much commuting. The tour would leave from Nashville, for the most part. That drive between Nashville and Ashville, I just wore it out that last year. Everybody in Sister Sadie was so supportive of me finishing college, and nobody was putting pressure on me to drop out. Several members of the band have kids. Honestly it felt like they truly care about me and my future. They were very encouraging and supportive of me to finish. So they were really understanding and they worked with me in every way that they could to get me where I needed to be. If I had to fly back right after a gig or whatever I needed, they really tried to support me. Together, we kind of made it happen. Jaelee from the band also finished her degree while playing in Sister Sadie. She had graduated by the time I joined the band. So it also was really nice to have her kind of in solidarity with me because she knew how hard it was. I would be in the back of the van writing essays, taking tests and calling into classes. It just felt like I had a bunch of supportive people around me and it helped me to do it. Honestly, just having closure and the opportunity to finish what I started was really meaningful and powerful for me and my journey. It definitely helped me to grow up and be fully prepared to be on my own. It kind of felt like an important step along the way. 

Sister Sadie is a force of musicality, songwriting, and a strong group of women. Could you talk about mentorship and getting to work with the band? 

Yeah. I feel really lucky to have gotten to know them. I had actually never met anyone in Sister Sadie before Deanie called me to audition. I mean, they're all so important to me in my life and everybody in that band is a fantastic person in their own way. It's fun to have a band with different generations. Jaelee is just a couple years older than I am. Dani and Katie are in their 30s, Deanie and Gena being in their early 50s. It feels like we all balance each other out on the road. I feel really lucky to just have sort of mentors in these people in some ways. There's so much that I am still figuring out and I'm still learning. Honestly, having a music career like mine feels like trial and error sometimes. I know I want to do this and I'm just figuring out how. I know I can call them and get advice or just have an understanding person who has maybe been through something similar. I feel really fortunate and I really respect all of them a lot. I feel really lucky that it happened at this point in my life, as I was finishing college and sort of moving into the world and coming into my career a little bit more. It just couldn't have happened at a better time. It feels like it was really meant to be in more ways than one. Musically and also just for where I'm at in my life right now. So yeah, I love them all. 

What are your aspirations in the writing process? 

I can be really shy and I think part of this move in life has been learning how to really truly put myself out there. It's so important, but it can be so scary. I've kind of been learning how to come out of my shell and put myself out there more. I think Deanie heard me, I had been writing this tune and I was noodling it during a sound check. She was like, what's that? And I was like, oh, it is this tune I'm writing. And she's like, that's great, we should play it in the band. Then we worked it up and we started playing it in our live shows.  They're so amazing about picking up on everybody's creativity. They're great leaders in that regard, knowing how everybody might be able to plug in. To answer your broader question, I love songwriting and tune writing. I have this whole list of things I want to accomplish in 2026. One of them is to do several co-writes in Nashville. I've recently played my first writers round there in town and it was actually so awesome and went really well. I met so many amazing songwriters and I have all of these contacts. Usually it's just a back and forth. We should write. Oh, when are you free? Oh, I'm on tour. Oh no, I'm on tour and really it's just like missing each other like ships in the night. I really want to make it happen in the coming year because it's just such a big part of my life. I've also talked a lot about co-writing with the Sadie ladies. I mean, Dani is just one of the best songwriters I've ever had a chance to work with. Her ideas are just amazing. She and I have shared ideas and talked about doing some writing. It's something that is on my list to delve into more in the coming year and because Nashville is kind of the place to do it. So many great writers and it's definitely an aspiration of mine. 

What are you into outside of Bluegrass musically, what are you digging these days?

Nice. Yeah, I could go anywhere I want. First of all, obviously, I've been kind of obsessed with honky tonk and classic country. I always actually have been. My sister and I, growing up, we adored old country music. We would sing those songs together. The Rogue Valley is not a hub for that kind of music. We had a West Coast Country Festival that was going on for a few years up in the Green Springs, where I’m from. That was actually so important for my teenage years and it just sort of cemented my love for that musical genre. But then I didn't have a lot of opportunities to play that music, especially in terms of gigs being a mandolin player. It never went away but just sort of lay dormant in college. Then living in Nashville has opened that door so much for me. Learning Tele, it's so new for me and actually it's kind of terrifying that I already have gigs that I do. I'm locking myself in my room trying to shed as much as I can. It’s so much fun and I feel super grateful to even have the opportunity just to try it out. I've been really digging all the Tele parts on those old recordings. Brent Mason on Alan Jackson's records is just incredible. I've been getting into the old Merle Haggard records too, I think Grady Martin is the player on a lot of those. He has that super classic, very distinct sound on Merle's records. I don't even know how to get that tone. I was trying to figure it out the other day, that's definitely a rabbit hole I’ve been jumping down. I've also, outside of bluegrass, been getting into back playing Irish and Celtic tunes. My tenor banjo was in storage at my dad’s house and the other day I was like, oh wait do you still have that here? I got it out, I have way too much music already I need to be learning, but I’ve just been learning Irish tunes the past couple days. It’s just so much fun! So that’s another one dear to my heart. So I'm kind of all over the map. I just love music so much, you know.