Tag: anniversary

An Oral History of the Infamous Stringdusters

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

BGS was founded 14 years ago and from the very beginning, we’ve been covering, collaborating with, and cheering on the Infamous Stringdusters. Our first posts about the group published to our site in 2013 – not even a year after our launch – spotlighting banjoist Chris Pandolfi’s Bluegrass Manifesto, the band’s only-four-years-old marquee event The Festy Experience, and their most recent album at that time, Silver Sky. Now, in 2026, they’re not only our Artist of the Month for the second time, they’ll be headlining our stage at Bourbon & Beyond this September, too. But, our love for the band – and the many partnerships we’ve built together – began, like most, back in 2007 with their now iconic debut album Fork in the Road and a banner year for the group at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass and the IBMA Awards.

Back then, when the Stringdusters took home trophies for Song of the Year (“Fork in the Road”), New Artist of the Year, and Album of the Year, perhaps no one – not even the band themselves – would have predicted the seismic, existential impact they would end up having on bluegrass and the as-yet-unnamed subgenre thereof: jamgrass. Twenty years on, the Stringdusters celebrate their duo of decades with 20/20, an album of 20 songs celebrating 20 years of defining and redefining bluegrass and jamgrass.

For our Artist of the Month coverage, BGS and Good Country co-founder Amy Reitnouer Jacobs sat down with all five members the Infamous Stringdusters for a wide-ranging conversation of a band that epitomizes bluegrass, jamgrass, and psychedelic string band music in the 2000s.

First of all, again, I wanna just thank you for doing this. We are so thrilled to have you guys as our Artist of the Month and congratulations on 20 years of the ‘Dusters.

I wanna start this with Panda actually, and this is not gonna be just an oral history interview, but I think, looking back on 20 years, it feels appropriate to start from the beginning. So let’s talk about origins and start back at Berklee [College of Music], if that’s cool. Tell us a little bit about the beginning of the band.

Chris Pandolfi: I arrived at Berklee in 2001, which was the year that Andy [Hall] had just left Boston for Nashville. I first met Critter [Chris Eldridge] through Zach Hickman, who was playing in Josh Ritter’s band. He went to Oberlin [University] with Critter. We got together and we were playing, and Zach had some free studio time at a spot in New Hampshire and we were gonna go record some music, just for fun. Our careers were not underway in any way, shape, or form. We didn’t have any grand designs here. We were just gonna go record some music and have some fun.

Then, on the precipice of this recording, we went down to the Cantab Lounge to meet this guy named Andy Hall. We went there and–

Andy Hall: [It was] The Plough and Stars.

CP: The Plough and Stars! Andy was playing–

AH: I don’t remember exactly if I was playing or if you were playing.

CP: And the next day we were in New Hampshire at this recording studio and we made this EP called Stable Horse. Essentially, Andy was already living in Nashville, so around that same time, he had met Jeremy [Garrett] and they were playing together. It was that recording session that got the wheels turning for me. Like, “Oh, we could do this thing with other people our age,” and not fall into the very sort of common thing in bluegrass where you get hired by someone else and you’re essentially a sideman.

We were recording and teeing things up, and we all had other gigs at that time. It was me, Andy, Jesse [Cobb], Critter, and Alan Bartram from the Del McCoury Band. But that was my earliest memory of “We could start a band with our contemporaries.” And Zach Hickman, I give him credit, he facilitated that.

I don’t even think we had the name “Stringdusters” yet. Alan got the offer to go play with Del McCoury and we had met Travis [Book] at IBMA, so we called him up and he came and lived in my driveway for a few months. True story.

Travis Book: You can really get away with a lot if you park your car in someone’s driveway and then try to stay outta the way.

So Andy and Jeremy, what are the origins of you guys starting to play together?

AH: Was it Ronnie Bowman? Was that the first time? I was in Ronnie Bowman’s band and the fiddle player and Ronnie had a bit of a falling out while we were on the road and–

CP: We were all at a festival, so we scooped up Jeremy and he got on the bus with Ronnie Bowman!

Jeremy Garrett: Yeah, I definitely knew about you two beforehand. And, of course, in bluegrass everyone’s a fan of Ronnie Bowman. He’s such a crooner and such a cool cat. I definitely had plenty of experience before, but this was like one of my first major Nashville gigs. And it was eye-opening very quickly that, as a sideman, it’s pretty limiting.

The conversations I remember started happening pretty fast in the back rooms: “Hey, let’s maybe consider doing something of our own. Long-term, how can we make this happen?” But it was just like whispers. I remember going to IBMA – that’s where I met Chris Pandolfi and he blew me away with his melodic banjo playing style and this futuristic sound that he had. I’d really never played with that before, because I came from a very traditional side of bluegrass.

CP: Didn’t I give you a copy of my record? I remember you telling me that.

JG: Yeah. And I listened to that record all the way home from IBMA – I’ll never forget – and my dad was riding with me. I was just like, “This guy’s awesome.” Overall, it felt like all of us coming together through our connection in Nashville and these music parties that used to happen on the reg. I don’t know if they still do. We would have huge jam sessions, especially at Panda’s Pad. There’d be 20-30 people all gathered up in somebody’s backyard, picking. And it was almost every night. So you can’t help but get tight and start seeing the writing on the wall, the possibilities, through those kind of connections.

CP: These days in Nashville are so different. It’s so much “cooler” now. There’s so many young people playing bluegrass and when you hear about a lot of the socializing in Nashville, it’s a lot of young musicians. When we were having these parties, it was a real diverse mix of ages. You had Sam Bush there, you had Scott Vestal, you had Ronnie Bowman, and the McCourys. We were the young cats around and there wasn’t a very vibrant young scene. We were intermingling with a lot of the elder statesmen of bluegrass.

That’s a really special time in Nashville. I can remember that’s when I started hanging out in town and there was like a magic in the air. That intergenerational mix doesn’t organically seem to be happening as much, but maybe it is and I’m just not invited to parties anymore.

So Travis, were you coming to Nashville from Colorado? Where were you before then?

TB: Yeah, I was living in Durango and Anders Beck from Greensky [Bluegrass] and I started playing music together in maybe 2002. There were gigs and we were learning this music and then Andy Thorn and some other friends – that’s Leftover Salmon – they just showed up in a music store one day. Andy was probably 19 on college break and we hung out with him for three days straight. When he went back to North Carolina, we called him up. We’re like, “Dude, you gotta come back! We gotta make a band! We’ll play RockyGrass, you’ll win the banjo contest, we’ll win the band contest.” Anders and I were like, “We can see the future, but we need Andy Thorn,” because he was such a compelling musician and just such a natural. Still is.

We started this band called the Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band with Jon Stickley, who’s also a visionary in our music. We were all picking and almost entering that same path as Leftover Salmon or Yonder [Mountain String Band]. We were already doing this like hippie bro band, just loving playing music and camping and playing festivals and going to hot springs and just fucking around. It was brilliant.

But then we went to IBMA, which at the time was the best way to show off your band and position yourself in the context of the larger [bluegrass] world. Try to get some gigs and go party your absolute brains out for a week. We were pretty rough around the edges, but one night I stepped off an elevator and Chris Eldridge came around the corner. [He] was like, “We need a bass player for this jam. Will you come jam with us?” I went into this little alcove and it was essentially the Stringdusters. It was Critter and Pandolfi and Andy Hall and Jeremy and Jesse Brock. I was just hanging out, holding on for dear life. I’m partying, I have a backpack full of beer, I have no shoes on, and I looked around and all my band mates were just there sitting along the hallway floor listening to the jam.

Andy’s partner at the time, Janice, said, ” Do you ever think about moving to Nashville?” I just laughed. Absolutely not. But I had fixed myself in their mind and once they exhausted all the possibilities of people who could play bass in Nashville – at least this is my understanding – they dug into their collective consciousness and called me up to audition. They’re like, “We think you’re the guy. When can you move to Nashville?” So I went out there to work on Fork in the Road that summer. What was this, 2004? Am I right, guys?

AH: I think that would’ve been 2005.

TB: Yeah, you’re right. 2005. [I] moved out there in September and lived in this guy’s driveway. It was kinda wild.

Falco, I promise we’re getting to you. We’re almost there!

In pretty quick succession though, you’ve got the core crew with Critter and Jesse [Cobb] at that time, you record the album, and get signed to Sugar Hill. And then things just start happening! Can you walk me through the time between recording and the IBMA Awards in ’07?

CP: There’s a lot of extremely disorganized touring. We’re driving around in two cars. I still have the notebook from the gigs – we were getting paid a few hundred bucks a night, maybe a thousand on a good night. Doing everything that we could.

We didn’t have grand designs on anything. The IBMA Awards was a really big moment for our band. Thinking back, it was a moment of legitimacy, of just getting [to] one of the hardest things as a band, which is the collective feeling that this thing is gonna stick together. That’s the peril of starting a band with players who you think are really good: at any time anyone could get hired away for something. But we were playing gigs, we were loving life, we were working on our music, and we were poor as could possibly be. I just remember the IBMA Awards as a big moment of solidity, of that feeling like we could really do this, we could really be in this for a long time.

TB: There was that first summer we had a couple of big anchor gigs, but a lot of it was really just driving around and killing time in between these anchors and hoping that we could reach the right audiences. I think that the big bluegrass scene was ripe for some young pickers who were taking it seriously and committed to each other.

JG: Yeah, getting gas in the tank right off the bat was huge for us, that’s for sure. And we spent a lot of time in between those gigs just going to be in the wilderness and spending time together. I don’t know, for lack of a better way of explaining it, [we were] bonding like a band.

But man, when you’re a real band and you’re not just like a frontman or whatever, you’ve got a real synergy with other guys in a group. It’s special. And I feel like a lot of what brought us together and [what] makes us as tight as we are now was those off times where we were discovering our lives and just doing cool stuff like that. Creating this thing together.

I do need to know who came up with the name. Where did the name come from?

CP: Ben Eldridge.

AH: Yeah!

CP: We were working with a list of pretty mediocre names and Ben came up with “Stringdusters.” After 20 years, I can say there’s a lot of bad band names out there, but the Stringdusters – I think it’s a cool band name and it suits us.

All right. Now we bring Falco into the mix. So how did you get mixed up in all this? Tell us your origin story.

Andy Falco: So, Critter fell off the back of a truck and I got picked up – no! What happened was, I’d known Pandolfi and Andy Hall from the Northeast bluegrass scene. I was playing with this guy, Buddy Miriam, who’s on Long Island, and who actually was friends with Bill Monroe because he got struck by lightning at the Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival, which of course was Grey Fox. And Monroe found out about it and reached out and they became friends. So he learned a lot of mandolin directly from Monroe.

My brother was getting into bluegrass and was like, “You should come to this bluegrass festival.” I went up there and saw Doc Watson and really got into playing bluegrass. ​I moved to Nashville maybe a year after Panda and Critter did. Andy Hall was already playing in Dolly Parton’s band. And I had met Jeremy, actually by accident, at SPBGMA. My first time in Nashville, some guy came up to me and said, “Hey man, how are you doing? How’s everything been?” I was like, “Great. This is my first time in Nashville. Everything’s been great.” Then he stopped and said, “Man, I thought you were someone else.” And he says, “Come meet my son.” That was Jeremy’s dad, and that’s the first time I met Jeremy.

When I moved to Nashville, these guys were starting the band. I was watching them doing their sets at IBMA. It was killer. Then when Critter left, they asked if I’d be in. I wasn’t gonna start until September and one month later was the IBMA Awards. So I just joined the band and here they are, winning all these awards.

JG: I would like to say, I’ll never forget your first gig. You killed it harder than literally anybody I’ve ever worked with to this day. Absolutely stepped into the role and blew it away. And it was very obvious at that moment that he was the right man for the job, for the Stringdusters.

AF: I had big shoes to fill with Critter – and Critter and I were friends. In fact, I knew Critter before I met anybody in the Stringdusters. We met at seven o’clock in the morning on the last day of IBMA, when we’d pick all night and our door was open. And here comes Critter with his guitar.

CP: Critter introduced us.

AF: Yeah.

CP: He said to me, “Do you want to go hear the fastest guitar player alive?” And I said yes.

AF: I worked with Critter, too. Critter was very supportive of coming over when I was preparing to join the band, showing me the parts that he played on the record. So I had a really good foundation, thanks to Critter, of what he had done. Then I was able to put my stamp on it.

So what is that pivot then? You all mentioned the kind of shift that occurred, moving you away from traditional bluegrass and more towards jamgrass. How did you find your own sound? What was the decision to pivot?

AH: I remember a specific show where we decided we were gonna try and extend some [of the] set. I think it was the Animus Theater in Durango and it was a Colorado bluegrass crowd, which was more of a dancing crowd. They were used to more diverse sounds. I don’t remember, we were just like, “Let’s try and put a jam in this one song,” or whatever. So we’re playing, we’re jamming, and we’re extending whatever song it was. The whole crowd was just dancing. The energy was feeding back and forth and it was like, “Whoa! This is so much more exciting,” in contrast to everyone sitting silently and clapping in between songs. We made a choice one night and we saw the crowd just light up and dance and lose themselves in the music, and that fed our energy.

CP: Also, we were into that stuff.

AH: Yeah.

CP: But we hadn’t really made that connection yet. The real moment that I remember is we opened three shows for Railroad Earth. We played the 9:30 Club. We played Theater of the Living Arts and, I think, and we played Burg Williamsburg, when our van broke down and we showed up last minute. Those are the gigs that I referenced in the Bluegrass Manifesto. When I did the IBMA keynote that grew out of that, it really referenced those. I remember a few shows, too, where we would come off stage and we’re like, “Oh my god, that jam. Let’s do that again.”

We played these shows with Railroad Earth and it connected some dots that didn’t connect automatically, even though we had Grateful Dead, Phish, playing all the time. We were really coming from that IBMA buzz and awards. And, like anything, it took some time to discover, [it took] some experience. That was when some real change started happening around our business. Then the music really followed that trend.

JG: I’ll say, you guys, don’t forget about the Zeltfestivals. They were beyond anything that I personally had ever experienced. We went out and these people were going absolutely bonkers for our music – they had barricades out there and stuff. I’d never seen any of that at a bluegrass show. To me, that was fire in the tank.

AF: I think that also a big part of that is just, I know for myself, not growing up playing bluegrass music and then getting turned onto it by Garcia and Grisman and people like that. But I think it was just like when I started learning bluegrass. There’s a way that you have to do it and then, finally, you get to a certain point where all these dots are being connected, where you start to let these other influences come out, because you start to get more comfortable as a band. You start to allow that like, “Yeah, why can’t we do it? Why can’t we mix these things?” Even just as individual players. Why can’t you play this style? Blending these kind of jammy elements and these rock elements and then seeing how it worked.

You all have such varied individual projects and influences. Do you still think that you’re shifting your sound? What are you listening to and is that influencing what you’re doing?

AH: It’s definitely influencing what we’re doing. I think, to Falco’s point, I feel like I’m allowing [in] more and more of my original influences that I grew up with. I was a metal dude in high school. I think the older I get, the more I enjoy letting in who I am.

AF: Getting away from the “that ain’t a part of nothing” bullshit, right? Like, what? Who’s to say, right?

JG: Yeah, at the end of the day it’s art and you gotta let that lead itself, if you’re a true artist. Otherwise, you’re doing a preservation society kind of thing in the bluegrass world. For the longest time, I felt we were all paying homage to this awesome music, but we’re not letting it breathe like it should sometimes. It’s very fun to be an artist and be able to have the permission to just kinda let it flow, which is what we let ourselves do. We let the art dictate what we did, and we were true to ourselves in that way. That was something that served us very well. Still does.

You all live in different places now. I know the band is not as centered in Nashville as it used to be, but you did talk about the off-times and how that bonded the group early on. How do you stay bonded as a band now? How have things shifted? Being a decentralized band, how has the writing recording process changed for y’all over the last 20 years?

JG: I think that’s an important point. Yes, we’ve changed a lot over the years, but we’ve been able to stay tight because of those early formative years when we were all just broke traveling around in a band. I didn’t have any brothers growing up, but these guys are definitely my brothers and they know more about me than anybody else in this world. To allow each one of us to have the freedom to live where we wanna live and come together the way that we want to come together, I think that has been really one of the main things that have kept us together.

Over the years we’ve all developed little side things outside of the band. I think that’s been healthy. For me, I like to do my own solo music, music that I write and I like to perform – and stuff that wouldn’t necessarily fit within the confines of the Stringdusters. But I still want to get that art out there. We continue to challenge each other. Music can be competitive in a not-healthy way. But I feel like we do it in a healthy way, in the sense that we drive each other to just be the best that we can be at what we do.

CP: I got married last fall and in the run up to my wedding, one of my aunts asked me, “Are all your bandmates gonna be there?” In my mind I had this moment where I was like, “Are my band mates gonna be there?” You might as well ask me if my family is gonna be there! It’s just life at this point. After 20 years, it’s cool to observe the level to which you become each other’s family.

That’s the definition of community and you don’t think about these things when you’re going into this life, but there are some incredible unintended consequences. That informs the music and that informs all the life experiences too.

And here we are, 20 years later. That’s pretty cool.

Explore more of our Artist of the Month coverage of the Infamous Stringdusters here.

Photo Credit: Daniel Milchev

Artist of the Month: The Infamous Stringdusters

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

During the Infamous Stringdusters’ recent holiday gig at The Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina, the storied venue was packed out with jamgrass freaks, the performance itself a kickoff of sorts for the band’s 20th anniversary in 2026. I found myself standing sidestage when show opener Bronwyn Keith-Hynes came up next to me. A smile emerged on her face taking in the band and the audience.

“The Stringdusters made me want to start a band,” the GRAMMY-winning fiddler said, turning to me. “The Fork In The Road album was the most influential modern bluegrass album for me when I was at Berklee.”

Keith Hynes’ sentiment conjured numerous memories and moments I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of when it comes to the ‘Dusters. The first time I ever laid eyes and ears on them, it was the 2008 Targhee Bluegrass Festival in Alta, Wyoming. I was 23 years old and a rookie reporter for the Teton Valley News, based just down the mountain in Driggs, Idaho. By that point in my life, both personally and professionally, I was diving deep into the jamgrass world – the intersection of ancient tones, psychedelia, improvisation, and a collective love of the Grateful Dead.

The initial spark of the modern jamgrass movement was lit by Yonder Mountain String Band, Leftover Salmon, and the String Cheese Incident, all three acts coming into the national spotlight by the end of the 1990s. A musical template had been formed, and the ‘Dusters would emerge in the early 2000s to throw gasoline onto that melodic fire, ultimately becoming a missing link (alongside Greensky Bluegrass) between jamgrass originators, those ‘90s propagators, and folks currently carrying the torch into new, exciting realms: Billy Strings, Sierra Ferrell, Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, and more.

“That’s what’s so beautiful about bluegrass music, in particular,” Stringdusters fiddler Jeremy Garrett told me recently. “You pass it on to the next generation and they take it and they do their thing with it. Luckily for us, we were around at a time that [that] was very important, and a transitional time in the industry.”

In 2010, a couple of years after my introduction to the band at Targhee, when I returned to my native North Country of Upstate New York, I found myself covering a show at the intimate Showcase Lounge at Higher Ground in Burlington, Vermont. I was there to see the ‘Dusters once again. Their sound and energy immediately transported me back to the Rocky Mountains that I missed dearly. (Sharing the bill was another rising jamgrass act, Trampled by Turtles.)

I remember walking away from that gig feeling in awe and refreshed with a genuine feeling that something was happening. Something was on the horizon when it came to bluegrass and string band music. This wasn’t a traditional bluegrass band in matching suits, standing like statues. It was a rock show with acoustic instruments. Baseball caps and long hair, grins ear-to-ear. More provocative than standstill, more vibrant than just going through the motions of what past generations were instructed to do.

“Being able to showcase our own songs, in our own way, [our] writing skills, and making the decisions on what was chosen to play and how to play it [were] foremost for most of us at the beginning,” Garrett says. “Over time, we realized that we were actually growing a community. And after all these years, that honestly has become the most important part, the most important thing that we could possibly do.”

What I witnessed in Wyoming and Vermont years ago is what I’ve continued to experience with the Infamous Stringdusters, in person and in method, from Florida to Colorado and beyond. They set the pace then for where we stand with jamgrass right now, built on a full-throttle approach, one which remains sonically elusive as well as paying homage to the architects of bluegrass and those who broke from the pack and made something all their own.

Aside from the talents of the Stringdusters, either as individuals or the sum of their parts, you also have a unique setup. Alongside founding members, banjoist Chris Pandolfi and Dobroist Andy Hall, who emerged from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, you have the tradgrass pedigree of Garrett, who was born and raised in a traveling family bluegrass band hailing from Idaho. This fusing of road-tested grit and grace with conservatory-style techniques is at the heart of what this group does best: jam.

All of which circles back to the Asheville Orange Peel performance in late 2025. There were tightly knit melodies and freewheelin’ improvisational explorations. They broke down the invisible walls between themselves and the audience, maintaining a two-way street of momentum, energy, and inspiration from both sides of the microphone – a vortex of sound and scope, all revolving around a deep sense of community.

“The band is stronger than ever and making some of the best music we’ve ever made,” Garrett says. “But, the thing I see that is the most important being carried on is that community factor. We certainly didn’t invent that, but we took note and applied the philosophy to our scene, and hopefully the next generation realizes how important that piece is.”

Ultimately, this 20th anniversary celebration for the Infamous Stringdusters is a culmination of a tried-and-true effort to bring this hallowed music into the unknown and unfolding musical landscape of the 21st century. With their upcoming album, 20/20 (out February 13 via Ameriana Vibes) they continue their efforts to break new ground and forge ahead, together, whatever the next 20 years hold for jamgrass and the ‘Dusters.

The Infamous Stringdusters are our Artist of the Month. Below, enjoy our Essential Infamous Stringdusters playlist and stay tuned as we share brand new and archive content on the ‘Dusters throughout the month of February here on BGS – and across our social media channels. Like our exploration of their 20-year discography or our oral history of the band featuring all five members in conversation.

Photo Credit: Daniel Milchev

The Man That Made All of Us Play the Banjo

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: For Earl Scruggs’s birthday, Thomas Goldsmith revisits a star-studded bluegrass festival tribute to the banjo legend from 1971 in Camp Springs, North Carolina. The 102nd anniversary of Scruggs’s 1924 birth in Flint Hill, North Carolina, is January 6, 2026.)

Like speakers at a testimonial dinner, each musician strode to the microphone in turn.

But instead of heaping on words of praise, a stage full of well-known pickers and up-and-comers used banjos to pay a lively tribute to Earl Scruggs.

The scene was the 1971 Labor Day weekend bluegrass festival in Camp Springs, North Carolina, at a performance where some of the best banjo players around joined Scruggs on stage. Led by the five-string king himself, banjoists including Sonny Osborne, J.D. Crowe, Bill Emerson, and Alan Munde jointly played Scruggs’s signature tune “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” some 22 years after its first recording.

The performance is a highlight of the 1972 documentary Bluegrass Country Soul, which enjoyed a 50-year deluxe re-release five years ago. Watch the clip here.

 

Sonny Osborne (left) gets emotional onstage after introducing Earl Scruggs (right). Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

Promoter Carlton Haney invited more than a dozen banjo players on the festival schedule to play along with Scruggs, who was then 47. (A second group performance, of “Dear Old Dixie,” doesn’t appear in the film. And a couple of the “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” performers didn’t make it to the screen.)

Millions of viewers have seen the clip as part of the movie or on YouTube, with Osborne bringing Scruggs on with an introduction that sounds starstruck.

“(It’d) be only right to call out probably the man that has made all of us guys up here play the banjo, or either has been a great influence, as he has in my complete life,” Osborne said. “In my whole banjo-playing ability … I could probably credit to this one man.

“Let’s all give a tremendous welcome to probably the best in the world, Earl Scruggs!”

Scruggs seemed overwhelmed by the audience’s ovation. The cheering feels as though it lasts forever, but took only a minute and a few seconds.

“That really fills my heart with joy,” Scruggs said after Osborne introduced him. “I did want to say one thing: Thank you, and guys like this is what keeps me going, my boys who works with me and you people who keep preaching music.

“I just don’t know what to say, except I’m picking with some guys that plays a tremendous amount of banjo. Don’t underestimate anybody up here. Man, they’re great.”

Earl at a Crossroads

In 1971, Scruggs had only broken up with his longtime duet partner Lester Flatt less than two years earlier. Not even a month before Camp Springs he had recorded along with other greats for Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s country-roots-popularizing Will the Circle Be Unbroken set. He was venturing into a country-rock sound with his band the Earl Scruggs Revue, along with his sons Randy, Gary, and Steve.

However, Scruggs’s work as a musical innovator remained – and remains – fundamental to the way a large share of bluegrass banjo players address the instrument. That’s true despite the introduction of a single-note style most associated with Don Reno and a chromatic or melodic approach heard in the playing of Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson.

Most of the pickers in the 1971 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” performance used the three-finger picking style Scruggs introduced in a band with Bill Monroe and Flatt on the Grand Ole Opry in 1945. The exception among the Camp Springs pickers, Rick Riman of the New Deal String Band, caused something of a stir with his chromatic rendition of the tune, not to mention his long hair, full beard, and striped shirt and pants.

How did Riman, who had also studied Scruggs style closely, decide to use the flowing melodic style for “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”?

“I just thought, “OK, let’s see if I can make this work,’” Riman, 83, said on the phone from Denver, Colorado, speaking to BGS in January 2026. “Because I had not prepared anything, and I didn’t even know what was on the program. They just said they want all the banjo players up there to pay tribute to Earl. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll get up there and do it.’”

And what has the reaction been?

“Mostly negative,” he said, with a touch of humor.

“One person said they were really glad to see somebody step out of the standardized [method], and that felt very, very good. Somebody else said, ‘You won’t believe how many people thought that you shouldn’t have been on stage at all.’

“And I get that a lot. That’s mostly the reaction I get, that I shouldn’t have been on stage. I shouldn’t have even been in the parking lot, like the least talented person on the stage and probably the least talented person in the whole park.”

The chromatic style remains one effective tool in the hands of players such as Béla Fleck and Noam Pikelny, but Riman, 28 that day in 1971, has gotten a load of grief over his choice to add some variety to the line of Scruggs-style players. “I would say, over the years, it’s pretty much been like 50-plus years of derision,” he said.

Riman has had one regret. “I should have practiced more,” he said. “I should have been better, but I had no idea.”

Although at Camp Springs he performed in the more recently created melodic and chromatic styles, like everyone on the stage that day in North Carolina, Riman was schooled in the style of the man honored beside them.

“I was really fascinated by Earl and anybody else who played his style pretty well,” he said.

 

Earl Scruggs reacts to his introduction and audience ovation and applause onstage in 1971 in Camp Springs, NC. Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

 

“Everybody Headed for the Stage”

We were fortunate to reach three of the banjo warriors who performed that day. Sadly, most of the players heard then have since died. Eddie Hoyle, then 14, the youngest of the Camp Springs lineup, is among the survivors and is still actively performing. He talked to BGS on the phone in December from his home in Georgia.

“I was up there playing with Curtis Blackwell and the Dixie Bluegrass Boys and I just remember them telling me that Carlton wanted all the banjo players to come down on the stage and play a tune with Earl,” said Hoyle, now 68. “So I got my banjo out, and everybody headed for the stage.

“I didn’t know if I’d get to take a break or not, but somebody got me in the line that was walking up to the mic. So it was pretty cool. And I remember I was not nervous; OK, probably didn’t know enough to be nervous.”

Most of the players that day stuck fairly close to Scruggs’s own licks on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” but Hoyle and others ventured a bit from the classic performance.

“I always tried to learn the right way, as Dad told us to do, but then I would try to put my own twist on it,” Hoyle said.

Nearly half the banjo players that day have been inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. They include Scruggs himself, of course, as well as J.D. Crowe, Bill Emerson, Alan Munde, Sonny Osborne, and Don Stover. Another banjo picker, Saburo Watanabe Inoue, founder of the pioneering Japanese band Bluegrass 45, won the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement award along with his brother Toshio, in 1995.

 

Sab Watanabe (who passed away in 2019) of the legendary Japanese band, Bluegrass 45, takes his turn at the mic. Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

 

Alan Munde Remembers it Well

Munde, 79, still a player and teacher, also spoke to BGS about the experience from his home in Springfield, Missouri. He recalled that he was playing with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys at the festival and took part in the group performance because Martin wanted him to.

“Thinking back on it and also remembering at the time, I didn’t really want to be a part of it, just because, then and now, I thought I would be so unworthy,” Munde said. “But I think Jimmy wanted me to do it, and you notice he’s there [in the film.] He thought I needed to be there, so I did it.”

Munde remembers the day as a landmark for him, the only time he heard Scruggs play live. Given all the great banjoists and backing musicians including Martin and Charlie Waller, it was an enchanting moment from the sound of Scruggs’s first lick.

“The thing that I remember so much about it is … we’re all standing there and Earl’s talking, and then he’s going to start to play,” he said. “And he, I always call this his ‘chang,’ where he just plays the first, third, and fifth string together and starts into the tune.

“As soon as he did that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s that sound.’ It just was immediately apparent that he was the one.”

 

Alan Munde (right) is flanked by Earl Scruggs during the all-banjos jam of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

Like the first players to tune into Scruggs’s playing in 1945 and like players from Béla Fleck on, Munde appreciates Scruggs’s sound in a way that seems almost mystical. Scruggs produced something that no other banjo player could.

Jimmy Martin, Munde’s boss at the time, used to tell a story involving the great banjo man Vic Jordan to illustrate the way Scruggs’s beautifully nuanced playing and full tone stood above the crowd of his followers.

“Jimmy was kind of down on Vic Jordan a little bit,” Munde said. “And he would tell this story to show that Vic didn’t know the right way. He said when Vic met Earl, he asked him what kind of microphone he used.

“And Earl said, ‘Sometimes I use those little bitty ones, and sometimes I use those real big ones.’

“And Jimmy’s point was that, in his mind, Vic was asking because he thought it was the microphone. But it didn’t matter. It all sounded like Earl every time.”

And hearing Scruggs’s sound that day at Camp Springs, not through a mic, not on a record, but right there next to him on stage, made Munde think the whole exercise was somehow wrong.

“When he did that pinch, I thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be a part of this.’ What we should have done is just stood back and listened to him, and then said, ‘Do it again.’”

Despite his misgivings at the time, Munde has wound up glad that he took part in the Earl-fest that day.

“Looking back on it, it’s been nothing but good for me, that I got to be there,” he said. “Here it is, 50 years later, people still bring it up. It’s helped get me a little legacy recognition, that I was there, so that’s been real good.”

A Star-Studded Lineup

The career of Sonny Osborne has been well documented, but Bluegrass Country Soul makes clear his admiration and friendship with Scruggs. During the tumult of applause following his introduction, Scruggs asked if he could say something, and Osborne appears to grin and say, “Not yet.” And Osborne cracks up when Scruggs uses his up-the-neck solo from “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” during the last time around for the tune.

Bill Emerson, whose long career included membership in the Country Gentlemen and much more, was interviewed at the time of the re-release of Bluegrass Country Soul. He talked about the pantheon of great banjo players.

“Don Reno, he had his style on the banjo; Earl Scruggs, he had his style on the banjo; Ralph Stanley, he had a style on the banjo,” Emerson said in the set’s booklet. “And on the radio, I could listen to any of them, just the first few notes of an intro, and tell you who was playing. Just by the style that they were playing, the tone that they had, and the timbre. Most people, when they started out playing the banjo back then, they got a bunch of Earl Scruggs’s records and sat down and tried to learn to play like Earl. But it’s mighty hard to sound like Earl, I can tell you. I was never able to do that, so I just tried to sound like Bill Emerson.”

 

Bill Emerson takes his turn playing a solo on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

Also on the show was multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Arnold (1952-1992), whose career was one of a kind, including excursions into Southern rock and solo albums on guitar and banjo as well as stints with Cliff Waldron, Charlie Moore, and the New Tradition, according to a 1983 Bluegrass Unlimited story. The article, by Chris Wathen, quoted Arnold on Scruggs: “When you learn all of what you think is hard stuff and then go back and try to play one of his tunes, you find out what the hard stuff really is. It’s his stuff. To play with that much power and volume, you’ve really got to be on top of things.”

Another of the clip’s well-known pickers, Don Stover (1928-1996), had been an early convert to Scruggs style, learning it not long after Scruggs’s first performances with Monroe, according to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

Stover was known for his work with brothers Bea and Everett Lilly during many years of performances in Boston. He played and recorded as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1957, even contributing harmony vocals to “In Despair.”

Earl’s son Randy, who appears playing an archtop banjo just before the end of the clip, went on to a distinguished career as a musician, songwriter, and producer.

Doing Their Times

The 55th anniversary of this notable moment in bluegrass will arrive in September. Looking back, the picking ranges from respectable to spectacular, but doesn’t maintain the dead-even tempo that’s supposed to prevail in bluegrass music. Fans remember the story that Earl and brother Horace Scruggs, as boys, used to start playing a tune, then separate to walk around their Flint Hill house in opposite directions. The idea was to check if they were still in time with each other after being out of earshot.

The dozen players on the Camp Springs group number would not have passed this test, based on a stopwatch run-through. While Scruggs’s December 1949 original recording had consistent solos of right at 11 seconds, he started the round robin at about 12.69 seconds and tempos wavered from there.

By the start of Riman’s melodic solo, near the end, the time was more than half a second slower. Randy and Earl Scruggs wrapped things up at roughly the same tempo.

But that’s just a quibble.

 

A contemporary of Earl Scruggs, Don Stover also performed a rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” during the jam. Screenshot from clip courtesy of Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc.

 

Remembering Earl

Bluegrass Country Soul director Albert Ihde did bluegrass lovers a real service by capturing these moments and others at the Camp Springs festival. And promoter Haney had another brainstorm resembling the story, pronounced “stoah-ry,” that he recreated of Bill Monroe and former band members six years earlier at Fincastle, Virginia.

Viewers will keep calling up the video for its closeups of Earl, smiling and even bobbing up and down for his breaks, and for the scenes of several of his outstanding followers, appreciating their moments on stage as they rolled their way through “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

Many videos of Flatt & Scruggs can be found on the web that illustrate Earl Scruggs’s unmatched musicianship. In the Bluegrass Country Soul segment viewers can also see a strong memorial to Earl Eugene Scruggs the person, his warmth, humor, and unselfishness as well as his brilliance as a musician.

Thomas Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist based in Tennessee and North Carolina. In addition to producing many hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines, he edited The Bluegrass Reader and authored Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic, both books for the University of Illinois Press.

Learn more about Bluegrass Country Soul and purchase a Golden Anniversary Legacy Edition box set of the film here. Read more about the box set and the making of the film here.

All photos courtesy of Albert Ihde, Ellen Pasternack, and Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc. Lead image: Earl Scruggs (left) and son, Randy Scruggs (right), perform “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” flanked by bluegrass banjo stars of 1971.

Artist of the Month: Opry 100

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This month, BGS is celebrating 100 years of the Grand Ole Opry! It would be hard to overstate the influence of the Opry on American roots music – hell, on music in general – over the past century.

From Earl Scruggs joining Bill Monroe to create the sound of bluegrass; to DeFord Bailey becoming the first Black Opry star and the first Black musician to break into the commercial music scene in Nashville; to the legendary meeting of Johnny Cash and June Carter; the Opry has been a catalyst for so many iconic moments. Below, we kick off our “Artist of the Month” celebration with our Opry 100 Essentials Playlist, which includes some of our favorite live recordings from the Opry, songs famously debuted on that legendary stage, and some of our favorite roots songs written about the Opry and its lore, too.

Did you know that Dolly Parton made her first Grand Ole Opry appearance in 1959 at the age of 13 and received three encores? To get a sense of how young Dolly might have sounded on that stage, we’ve included one of her very first singles, “Girl Left Alone,” (the B-side of the now well-known “Puppy Love”), recorded when she was just 11 years old and released the same year as her Opry debut.

Elvis famously made his Opry debut in 1954 at the age of 19, singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in a style that was so poorly received a manager told him to “go back to driving a truck,” or something of that nature. You can hear his rockabilly version on our playlist.

In 1969, Linda Martell was the first solo Black woman to perform on the Opry, singing “Color Him Father” for her debut. Although she faced rampant racism throughout her career, her first performance on the Opry was met with two standing ovations and she went on to perform there 12 times over the years.

The Opry has also been fodder for songwriting, inspiring many tracks over the years. Early Opry star David “Stringbean” Akeman met Bill Monroe while playing semi-professional baseball and went on to play clawhammer-style banjo in his band from 1943 to 1945. After parting ways with Monroe’s band, Stringbean became an Opry star in his own right and penned the song “Opry Time in Tennessee.”

Stringbean and his wife were tragically murdered in 1973 by thieves who had heard of him storing cash in his home. In 2009, Sam Bush released his song, “The Ballad of Stringbean and Estelle,” co-written with Guy Clark and Verlon Thompson. “The thieves laid in wait for hours/ But things didn’t go their way/ But he wouldn’t let go of his Opry pay,” sings Bush on his album, Circles Around Me.

 

@cmt #SabrinaCarpenter makes her #grandoleopry debut 💋✨🎙️ #opry100 #slimpickins #mansbesfriend ♬ original sound – CMT

Shortly before the Opry was moved from downtown Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to the newly built Opry House in 1974, John Hartford released “Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry,” a scathing commentary on the commercialization of country music. “Right across from the wax museum/ They used to line up around the block/ From east Tennessee and back down home again … Broad Street will never be the same,” Hartford sings nostalgically on his legendary Aereo-Plain album.

While the Opry is known as a country music gold standard, over its 100 years as a live-broadcast radio show it has held clout across the genres and in popular culture – not just in country. This year, as part of the celebration of its 100th anniversary, the Opry has been featuring 100 Opry debuts and first-time performances. These special appearances have showcased the broad impact of the Opry, hosting the likes of pop star Sabrina Carpenter who said, “My mom raised me on the artists who have stood up here.”

Whether in country, bluegrass, Americana, or beyond, the Grand Ole Opry continues to be a musical powerhouse, 100 years after its barn dance birth. While we look ahead to the next century of Opry magic, we’re beyond excited to join the Grand Ole Opry family in celebrating Opry 100 for the entire month of November. Enjoy our Opry 100 Essentials Playlist below and relive the Opry 100: A Live Celebration television special on NBC from earlier this year here, too. You can read our primary feature on Opry 100 right here. Plus, stay tuned all month as we have brand new and archive articles, interviews, and features we’ll be sharing here and on socials all spotlighting the incredibly legacy and community of our beloved Grand Ole Opry as we countdown to November 28, 2025 – the Opry’s official 100th birthday!

Lead Image: Opening of the Grand Ole Opry House in 1974, courtesy of Ryman Hospitality Properties.

Artist of the Month:
Greensky Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Michigan music isn’t just Motown or the MC5, Bob Seger or (ugh) Kid Rock. While it’s seldom mentioned as a modern bluegrass hotbed, the Wolverine State has become an unlikely 21st century hub of the latter-day bluegrass offshoot jamgrass. And at the center of this upland strain of music is where you’ll find Greensky Bluegrass, a quintet that is our Artist of the Month for October.

The roots of jamgrass go back to the 1970s, when New Grass Revival took inspiration from the bluegrass adjacency of the Grateful Dead and other proto-Americana rock acts, injecting rock and roll overtones into their music. It was also during this period that Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia went back to his original folkie roots with 1975’s Old & In the Way, a super-session album that would stand as the top-selling bluegrass LP of all time until O Brother, Where Art Thou? a quarter-century later.

Fast-forward to the 1980s, when New Grass Revival banjo maestro Béla Fleck went in some truly idiosyncratic and worldly directions with his new group The Flecktones. Then came the 1990s-vintage H.O.R.D.E. Festival and a generation of bands like String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, and Phish that further obliterated whatever boundary remained between bluegrass and rock.

That set the stage for Greensky Bluegrass, whose emergence in 2000 cued up another chapter of combining traditional bluegrass with rock-band theatrics (to the point of even including a bitchin’ onstage light show). Greensky originally formed as a trio of mandolinist/frontman Paul Hoffman, guitarist Dave Bruzza and banjo player Michael Arlen Bont, convening in the fall of 2000 after meeting at an open-mic show in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Greensky had plenty of traditionalist bona fides, covering classic bluegrass pantheon cuts by the likes of Stanley Brothers, Charlie Poole, and Bill Monroe. But they’d cover the likes of Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Talking Heads, and (yes) the Grateful Dead, too. That has continued over the years as their lineup expanded to a quintet with the addition of resonator guitarist Anders Beck and bassist Michael Devol. As an indicator of their eclectic tendencies, one of the studio producers Greensky has worked with is Steve Berlin (who handled 2016’s Shouted, Written Down & Quoted), best-known as saxophonist of the acclaimed Latino rock band Los Lobos.

One big milestone of Greensky’s first decade came at Telluride, the storied annual bluegrass festival in Colorado, where they won the band contest in 2006. They’ve steadily built themselves up as a live draw playing bigger venues, becoming a major presence at Red Rocks, the Colorado amphitheater that is the high church of jamgrass. This September, Greensky played the 20th headlining show of their career at Red Rocks.

As they progressed, Greensky provided an inspirational example for younger acts following in their wake, most notably a young guitarist from their home state of Michigan. Born William Apostol in 1992 in the college town of Lansing, he adopted the stage name Billy Strings as a teenager. Greensky was well-established by then and served as Strings’ mentors, collaborating frequently and giving him a choice opening-act slot on a 2018 tour. Strings has gone on to become a worldwide arena-level star, something like the jamgrass genre’s Nirvana equivalent to Greensky’s Sonic Youth.

Fittingly, Strings is one of the cameo guests appearing on the new Greensky album, XXV, which marks the group’s 25-year anniversary with all kinds of star power. Nine of the album’s 13 tracks feature guest appearances from some of the top names in the field.

Sam Bush, a co-founder of the previously mentioned jamgrass pioneers New Grass Revival, opens the first track “Can’t Stop Now” with one of his trademark lightning-speed mandolin runs. Americana stars Nathaniel Rateliff and Aoife O’Donovan turn up to provide lead vocals on a couple of songs. Other tracks feature String Cheese Incident drummer Jason Hann, New Orleans scion Ivan Neville and, from Trey Anastasio Band’s horn section, trumpeter Jennifer Hartswick and trombonist Natalie Cressman. Among the guests with Michigan ties are Phil Lesh & Friends pianist Holly Bowling and, from the Great Lakes State supergroup Sweet Water Warblers, vocalist Lindsay Lou.

Greensky has always been more than willing to expand tunes out to epic, near-galactic dimensions, and XXV has more than enough sprawling solos to satisfy the pickiest of jamgrass fans. Most notable is the 14-plus minutes of “Last Winter in the Copper Country,” on which Bowling’s rippling piano takes center-stage. Bowling also stars on “Windshield,” a longtime Greensky favorite that appeared on the band’s 2014 album If Sorrows Swim in an arrangement of just her piano and Hoffman’s powerful bellow – the closest thing to operatic bluegrass this side of The Hillbenders’ bluegrass take on The Who’s Tommy. That’s only one of the songs from throughout the Greensky discography that they reprise in (sometimes drastically) rearranged form for XXV.

In anticipation of the new album’s release date, which is set for Halloween, check out our Essential Greensky Bluegrass playlist below. Plenty of further Greensky content is also on the way, including a feature interview with the group and plenty of excellent picks from the archives, as well. Follow along all month here on BGS and on our social media pages as we celebrate Greensky Bluegrass as our Artist of the Month.

Photo Credit: Dylan Langille

Alison Krauss Marks Silver Anniversary of This Classic Album

Posted on by Editor

Twenty-five years ago this month, Alison Krauss glided into the mainstream with Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection. Did you wear out your copy, too?

Envisioned as a way to highlight the songwriters who were important to Krauss, according to a Billboard article published a few weeks before release, the project included what many would consider her signature song: “When You Say Nothing at All.” Originally recorded for a Keith Whitley tribute album, Krauss’ version positioned her as one of the finest ballad singers of her generation, a skill that wasn’t quite on full display on her bluegrass albums with Union Station.

She told Billboard that, as a producer, Now That I’ve Found You gave her “the chance to record material we do that doesn’t necessarily fit within the structure of our [other] records.” Along with “When You Say Nothing at All,” the double-platinum project offered “Oh, Atlanta,” “Broadway,” and “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” as well as exquisite selections from her prior Rounder albums.

In the article, Krauss explained that she turned down a chance to open for Garth Brooks because the arenas “were just too loud for me,” although she thought it was “pretty neat” that he would ask a bluegrass band to open his shows. She also reiterated that the album “is not a representation. It’s missing the other half of what I do with Union Station.”

Taking the music business perspective into account, the article addressed the anticipation for “When You Say Nothing at All” at country radio and CMT, as well as the label rollout and the expected sales of the album. In some ways, it’s still the same conversation surrounding any critically-acclaimed artist poised for crossover appeal: How do you retain the core audience without being “too commercial”? Or in this case, how do you market an artist that Billboard describes as having “soft, lush ballads on one side and her bluegrass band work on the other”?

At the end, Krauss offered her own opinion among all the industry input: “We just try to do whatever fits the song,” she said. “I don’t think selling out either way is good.”