A while back we did a short piece about the band Crooked Still and where they came up with their band name. It was requested by a reader in the comments that we do a similar piece about The Infamous Stringdusters.

“Stringdusters” is fairly easy to figure out by itself, it’s probably a reference to keeping the strings clean by playing all the time. But where did the “Infamous” part come from? Andy Hall was kind enough to relate the story to me. Here’s what he had to say.

Actually Ben Eldrige came up with it. We had been through quite a naming crisis at the beginning. We started as Wheelhouse, but that was a metal band from L.A. Then we were Broken Drought, which is the title of a Robert Frost poem. Noam Pikelny suggested that, so we’ll blame that one on him. The Stringdusters was a band that Jethro Burns was in, but wasn’t around anymore. We added the “Infamous” to help distiguish from that. Hopefully we will eventually earn that description!

Coming up with band names is so hard. The ridiculous ones come easy. Sabertooth, Six On A Stick, The Free Radicals to name a few. Ironically these are probably all taken. I like where we ended up. The other cool part of The Infamous Stringdusters is that it’s acronym is IS.

I would guess we might be seeing that on a T-shirt sometime later this year!