Tag: Bill Monroe

The Story Behind a 1981 Masterpiece: The Bluegrass Album

Posted on by Editor

Tony Rice wanted to do a bluegrass album in 1981, but not just any bluegrass album.

It was time for another Tony Rice project for Rounder Records, though he had always made his bluegrass records along with those that featured his take on David Grisman’s genre-expanding musical experiment that Tony dubbed “Spacegrass,” such as Acoustics (1979), Mar West (1980) and Still Inside (1981).

By this time, Tony had also been part of many groundbreaking bluegrass recordings, including the legendary Rounder 0044, J.D. Crowe & The New South (1975), as well as solo albums such as Guitar (1974), California Autumn (1975), Tony Rice (1977) and the marvelous Manzanita (1979), which managed to become one of the best bluegrass recordings of all time without a banjo. In addition, he and Ricky Skaggs offered one of the best examples of early country duet styles on the inimitable Skaggs and Rice (1980).

The album Tony had in mind in 1981 would go on to be considered a masterpiece: The Bluegrass Album. It would also launch a franchise, with subsequent volumes in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1989, and 1996.

Tony didn’t yet have a name for the album but he wanted the new record to be a straight-ahead paean to the early bluegrass he was raised on, specifically the canon of Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs. The reason, to him was clear: 1

“I remember thinking back then very well that bluegrass music was really in the toilet. And it was. It was at maybe its lowest point in its history. It was a rarity to even see a good bluegrass band that used an acoustic bass back then. Bluegrass bands were spread out all over the stage, individual microphones ten feet apart and it was just like a different world. It wasn’t there anymore. And The Bluegrass Album was kind of a deliberate attempt to get back to that.

“And it worked; it hit the bluegrass music world with ten times the impact that I thought it would in terms of satisfying or pacifying any bluegrass aficionado. Even the more contemporary players liked it. The traditionalists really liked it. All of a sudden here was this sound again, and it hadn’t been done since Flatt & Scruggs and Monroe and [Jimmy] Martin and Jim & Jesse at their best, and [The Osborne Brothers’] Sonny and Bob at their best. And here was the music resurrected again in its purest form, maybe even a little more precision than the originals.”

When it came time to choose who would play on the record, he thought of course of J.D. Crowe, whose playing by this time was deeply embedded in Tony’s sense of rhythm and timing. He also thought of Doyle Lawson and Bobby Hicks “…because I thought that they could do it better than anybody that I could think of. I knew I was going to be doing a bunch of Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs stuff, and I wanted to do a bluegrass album that was just as pure as it gets.

“The banjo player was logical, but I needed a mandolin player and tenor singer that could cover both of those sectors of bluegrass and do it well. Doyle was the only guy that could have done it, who could have played mandolin like that. On a Monroe tune, he could give it a Monroe flavor, and he could give it a Monroe tenor. On a Flatt & Scruggs tune, he could give it that Everett Lilly or Curly Seckler flavor, tenor too.

“And back then, Bobby Hicks was really riding the wave of a bluegrass fiddle renaissance. I mean, there was the smoothness of Kenny Baker and the unusualness of Vassar Clements, but there was a fiddle player in Hicks that was almost like every damn bluegrass fiddle player from Howdy Forrester, Chubby Wise, all the way down through the ranks, rolled up in one. And not only that, but he could play it so hard and so deliberate. And when it came time to back up something, he knew exactly what to do. And you can hear that shit. That’s the reason his backup on those mixes, if you listen to it, it’s really loud. His backup is in your face as much as the solos are—it was too pretty not to have it out there.”

Tony recalled that “Bobby and I ended up recording on a record of Ricky’s called Sweet Temptation. I heard Bobby playing that fiddle in the studio and we became real good friends.”

J.D. Crowe remembered that it was his idea to include Lawson: “Tony was talking to me about who to get for tenor. There was [Jimmy] Gaudreau, there was Ricky, there was Doyle. I said, ‘Well, for what this project is… And we’ve played with Ricky. So I think probably Doyle.’ Now I love Gaudreau’s singing, but for this record, Doyle was the one to have, for the mandolin playing, and the timing, and tenor pull, the phrasing. And I don’t think Tony had worked with Doyle at that time.” 2

On bass, Tony turned once again to his constant musical companion in this era, Todd Phillips, a fellow alum of the David Grisman Quintet. While Todd had played second mandolin in that group, he turned out to be an amazing bassist, and he played on both Guitar and Manzanita as well as on Tony’s Spacegrass recordings.

As the band listened to the results, Tony began to rethink how the project should be branded: “The first Album Band album was slated to be a Tony Rice bluegrass album and then after I got everybody together and started hearing playbacks, I thought, no, I’m not gonna do that. This sounds too much like some sort of a band. It came out under everybody’s name. I didn’t invent the name ‘The Bluegrass Album Band.’ I’ve always detested it. Milton Harkey is the inventor of that name.

“By the time the band had decided to go on a tour, it had to call itself something. Nobody knew what to call it. I didn’t know what to call it. And by then, the buying public in the bluegrass world had been buying three volumes of this stuff, and they were calling it The Bluegrass Album. Milton’s logic, I think, was, ‘Well, this is The Bluegrass Album Band. This is not just the album, this is going to be the band.’”

The group’s early albums were recorded in Berkeley, California, at 1750 Arch Street, the studio where Tony had recorded most of the Grisman records as well as Tony Rice (his first Rounder solo record), Manzanita and his first Spacegrass recordings. The session was cut with no headphones and no overdubs.

Tony remembered: “The first three volumes there were no overdubs. The idea was that when you edit, you’ve still got the entire ensemble playing together rather than piecing it together one guy at a time or making tracks and going back to overdub vocals. No matter how much you edit, you’ve still got the band playing live.

“There were two rooms at Arch Street. There was a big, elegant room upstairs with a control room that was in this mansion of a house and the guy who owned it was the first violinist for the San Francisco symphony. He was getting old and he built this room after he retired so that he could play his violin and hear it. And that was the main room at Arch Street, but they also had an isolated, conventional studio downstairs that was adjoining the control room.

“So the first two volumes of the Album Band were done in the upstairs room, and you could hear a pin drop. When you get guys gathered around, you could just hear every little nuance working together. We were individually miked and then Billy (Wolf, the engineer) hung a Neumann quadraphonic mic over the top of the whole ensemble for the purpose of capturing the room sound.”

To Tony it was more important to capture the spirit and energy of the traditional bluegrass from the 1950s: “I will accept mistakes to be able to have it live if it’s got the spirit. Listen to those Album Band records—they’re loaded with mistakes: off-pitch harmony vocals and weird tuning discrepancies here and there; missed fiddle notes. But who gives a shit? It’s almost like the discrepancies have a value of their own.”

Although Tony had a definite idea of the kinds of material he wanted to record, he admitted, “It was kind of a collaborative thing, you know. I came up with a list of tunes before we went into the studio, a list of 20 tunes to pick from. And Doyle would bring out a couple other things, and then when we got in the studio, a lot of times we’d do just whatever came to mind.”

Doyle Lawson remembered in more detail how part of the material was chosen: “Most of the time, J.D. and I would fly out together, and we’d usually meet in Atlanta and fly from there to California. And we’d write down a list of songs. I’d say ‘What about this?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah. What about this?’ And we’d make us a list. We’d have eight, ten or twelve, whatever. We’d have a whole slew of them. And then when we got out there, Tony would have his list. We’d go through and kind of pick ‘em out—‘Who knows this one?’ ‘Yeah, I do!’ We might run through them one time or so just to figure out what we were going to do, who was going to do what where.” 3

But these were not mechanical recreations of the originals. At various times, the players would be adamant about not playing breaks or certain signature phrases because they didn’t appear in the originals, yet they also needed to play to the strengths of this extraordinary set of musicians. For one, there were no guitar breaks in the originals, but then again, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they didn’t have Tony Rice.

Tony remembered: “I think it was Doyle who talked me into playing any guitar solo I played on the first couple volumes. I didn’t want to do any. But it was Doyle who kept kind of prodding, ‘Well, I don’t want to play a mandolin solo there. People are going to expect you to play a little bit.’”

Tony’s break on Flatt & Scruggs’ “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” has become such a classic that you will undoubtedly hear it in jam sessions today. Blue Highway banjoist Jason Burleson remembers hearing “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” and Tony’s break for the first time: “It was the first time I ever heard Tony play a solo. I had no idea it was a guitar. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Wow that’s a cool mandolin break,’ until it got to the end and there was a G Run, and I thought, ‘There’s no way that was a guitar.’ I must have set the needle back 50 times trying to comprehend what I just heard. I really didn’t know that was even possible to do on a guitar.

“At that point I’d been playing a couple of years and all I ever saw a guitar player do was a G Run. I became instantly obsessed with that solo and his solo on ‘Molly and Tenbrooks’ on the same album, and ended up buying every record I could find with Tony’s name on it. At every festival, I went in search of anyone who could maybe show me a little bit of how to do that. I remember being really skeptical that anyone could actually play and sing that well. I thought it surely must be some kind of studio trick. Then of course I saw the Album Band in Denton [North Carolina] and it was even better than the record.”

“Blue Ridge Cabin Home” is the obvious choice to begin this collection. The power and precision of both the playing and singing here make it a standout track, one that the group, once it began touring, kicked off almost every show with. When they performed at the very first International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) awards show in Owensboro, Kentucky, in September 1990, they became the only group in the history of the awards to earn an encore. From Crowe’s power pinch, fans knew they were in for a thrill.

Crowe recalled that the group didn’t need to spend a lot of rehearsal time on the material because they all knew it so well: “Just our phrasing, that was the only thing. And that wasn’t hard either, because we had all done ‘em so much and done ‘em together. Especially me and Tony. And of course, Hicks, he learned off the same thing we did. So it just fell together.”

To Doyle, who was busy at the time touring and building repertoire with his own new band Quicksilver, it “…was a joy just getting to be there and not have to do anything except play mandolin and sing tenor. For me, I was in seventh heaven.”

Perhaps the moment that best defines the power and drive of this record, and indeed, the whole series, is J.D. Crowe’s half break near the end of “Molly and Tenbrooks.” His slide seems impossibly long and his syncopated, bluesy phrasing syncs with Tony’s guitar to create one of the great moments in the history of the genre, even if it is only a few seconds long.

Once again, engineer Kevin Gray of Cohearant Audio has outdone himself for a new reissue on Craft Recordings with a stellar all-analog remastering with lacquers cut from the original stereo master tapes. With the album now available for the first time ever on vinyl, the first hi-res remastering is brilliant, bright and powerful—a must-have for any of the countless fans of these classic recordings as well as a new generation just discovering the magic of Tony Rice and his entourage’s Golden Age recordings.

Like so many of those other Tony Rice records, The Bluegrass Album’s versions of these classic songs became the standards that subsequent generations would learn and continue to emulate. Indeed, within a couple decades of its release in 1981, groups in parking lot and campground sessions were describing the songs from this record and subsequent BGAB projects as “old Bluegrass Album Band songs…”

And this continues today. It’s a measure of the legacy of this record and those that followed in the series. Tony certainly succeeded in bringing “the real stuff” back front and center in the music. The audience for this kind of music had never really gone away, but it was the 1980s that saw the first real neo-traditionalist flowering in the genre’s history, with groups like The Johnson Mountain Boys and Nashville Bluegrass Band hitting their stride. The first tap into that free-flowing keg of tradition was The Bluegrass Album.

1 Author interview with Tony Rice, 2006; other Rice interview material from Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story (Word of Mouth Press, 2010).

2 J.D. Crowe interview with Author, 2005.

3 Doyle Lawson interview with Author, 2008.

It’s Time to Induct Dolly Parton Into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Country superstar Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, and the entire world is mourning a beloved musician, singer, songwriter, and picker – and the bluegrass community has lost one of its most prominent global ambassadors.

Born in 1946, Parton enjoyed a resplendent and diverse musical career that spanned seven decades, beginning in her beloved Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, where she grew up steeped in “old-timey” and “mountain music.” She would go on to be inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (despite her objections to the latter honor), as well as the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2005 she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts and in 2006 she received the Kennedy Center Honors. Parton would garner 11 Grammy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy (and more than 50 additional nominations), three Emmy Awards, 13 ACM Awards, 10 CMA Awards, four IBMA Awards, and many, many more accolades and trophies – including two Academy Award nominations and an honorary Oscar.

While Parton is known as an artist and songwriter – reportedly penning more than 3,000 songs in her lifetime – she enjoyed a well-rounded career in many fields, in the arts and beyond, starring in films, writing and producing stage shows, plays, and musicals, producing films and TV, publishing and writing books, bringing food and home goods lines to market, planning a chain of truck stops – and being “Dreamer-in-Chief” of Dollywood, her namesake theme park in her home county in East Tennessee. In the most recent days of her life and career, Dolly was a truly ubiquitous celebrity and cultural figure, not just in the USA, but around the world.

It would be nearly impossible to overstate her influence not only in country, roots music, and Americana, but in bluegrass, too. Parton was a devoted proponent and picker of bluegrass over the course of her entire career; she released more than a handful of decidedly bluegrass albums out of her dozens of LPs. Two of them, The Grass Is Blue (1999) and Heartsongs: Live From Home (1994), are often regarded as two of her best releases of all time – especially The Grass Is Blue, reportedly touted by members of her own team and inner circle. And bluegrass touches and influences would show up across her body of work, including in her original musical and her film and TV projects. Even more old-time and mountain music threads have been woven through her musical output than straight-up-and-down bluegrass has, with bedazzled mountain dulcimers and autoharps and tin whistles just as common in her videos and stage appearances as her trusty rhinestoned guitars and banjos.

At the turn of the century, Parton released The Grass Is Blue as well as Little Sparrow (2001) and Halos & Horns (2002), partnering with iconic bluegrass and country label Sugar Hill. The albums arrived at a tumultuous and fraught time in Parton’s career, when daytime television talk shows and tabloids seemed to be her business (and music’s) bread-and-butter. She and her management successfully leveraged the sounds, aesthetics, and cultural signifiers of bluegrass with this trifecta of albums – which were musically excellent, though critics regarded some of them with mixed opinions – to yet again employ a “rags to riches” storyline, as she had her entire career.

At this relative low point of visibility in her career, experiencing a sort of commercial and pop cultural lull, bluegrass was there to spark the resurgence that would bring Dolly not only back into the mainstream, but would lay the foundation for the peak of her cultural magnitude in the 2010s and 2020s. It’s a storyline – a trope and an archetype – she had inhabited across her career, from the little “one room cabin” Tennessee mountain home to Hollywood and her white “limozeen.” But just like those earliest days of her young life, as a youngster singing into a tin-can microphone she fashioned with a stick on her front porch, bluegrass, old-time, and mountain music have always been at the core of Parton’s success and her broad appeal.

Her collaborations with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, especially Trio (1987) and Trio II (1999), boast perhaps the most superlative bluegrass recordings Dolly ever cut, and they are certainly the most well-known. Although The Grass Is Blue listens as more traditional, straight-ahead bluegrass and is adored by ardent fans, the Trio albums had much larger audiences. Trio included “Those Memories,” written by Alan O’Bryant (Nashville Bluegrass Band) while Trio II credited Del McCoury (“I Feel the Blues Movin’ In”), Harley Allen (“High Sierra”), and the Seldom Scene’s John Starling (“He Rode All the Way to Texas”) as songwriters. To this day both McCoury and O’Bryant joke about their Trio cuts being their biggest hits – and McCoury will giggle as he admits he never wants to sing “I Feel the Blues Movin’ In” again after Dolly had done it. Parton’s voice always typified the ever-elusive “high lonesome sound” of bluegrass, as coined by its proverbial father, Bill Monroe, but especially so with her sharp soprano combined with the powerful belt of Ronstadt and the soft patina of Harris’s voice.

Both Trio albums have all-star bands as well, including (but not limited to) Herb Pedersen, Mark O’Connor, John Starling, and Ry Cooder (Trio) and Starling, O’Connor, Carl Jackson, David Grisman, Roy Huskey Jr., Edgar Meyer, Larry Atamanuik, and Alison Krauss (Trio II). That’s right, Krauss – in 1999 already a multiple Grammy winner with two RIAA Gold records – was a side musician on the project, playing fiddle on four of the tracks. Heartsongs also had an incredible and vast roster of bluegrass greats lending their talents: Alison Krauss, Carl Jackson, Huskey Jr., Suzanne Cox, Rhonda and Darrin Vincent, Ronnie and Rob McCoury, Randy Scruggs, Ron Block, Adam Steffey, Jerry Douglas, Viktor Krauss, and more.

On 9 To 5 And Odd Jobs, a concept album of working class songs built around “9 To 5” and released in late 1980 just before the eponymous hit film, Bobby and Sonny Osborne can be heard joining Dolly on the vocal trio on “Hush-A-Bye Hard Times,” while Sonny lends banjo elsewhere on the LP, too. Parton’s White Limozeen (1989), a cosmic crossover journey from the mountains to the discotheque and back again, was produced by Ricky Skaggs – who played guitar and mandolin on the project – and featured Béla Fleck performing its striking banjo parts, like on the delightful opening track “Time for Me To Fly.” Little Sparrow, The Grass Is Blue, and Halos & Horns have similarly deep, impressive, and virtuosic credits as the Trio projects and Heartsongs, covering vast swathes of the bluegrass scene in the ‘90s and aughts. All of your favorite bluegrassers have picked with the queen.

Parton had a habit of surrounding herself with the best in bluegrass, in the studio and on stage. On morning and late-night television appearances, or during awards show performances, Dolly would be surrounded by pickers like Sam Bush, Chris Thile, Jim Mills, Bryan Sutton, Barry Bales, Stuart Duncan, and many more. Whether promoting Heartsongs, The Grass Is Blue, Trio, Trio II – or even going far back into her career, in its earliest days – Parton brought bluegrass and its influences and textures to many millions on TV. And still many more millions all around the world with her recordings, songs, and collaborators.

It seems everyone agrees that, despite her stratospheric level of fame, Parton is remarkably down to earth, present, and accessible. Taking a sample of her many features on songs by bluegrass artists demonstrates this. An international superstar, she would still – over and over – offer up her talents and time to guest with bluegrass artists on their own recordings and releases.

“Heartbreaker’s Alibi” by Rhonda Vincent is a downright craveable modern bluegrass rager, with Parton and Vincent sharing vocal duties and harmonizing effortlessly as they loop, swirl, and embellish around each other. That would not be the only time the pair would collaborate. Parton has gone on the record more than once to gush about bluegrass singer-songwriter Claire Lynch, who sang background vocals with Dolly on The Grass Is Blue and Little Sparrow. It’s clear she’s a true fan and inhabitant of this music; Parton has also been featured on songs by the Grascals, Carl Jackson, Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers, Reneé Fleming & Béla Fleck, Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and oh-so-many more. Her live television performance of “Mule Skinner Blues” with Bill Monroe is one of her most iconic videos and appearances; it’s perhaps equalled only by her reprise of the track on The Grass Is Blue – and her lovely, giggling ad lib on that recording, “I’m a lady mule skinner.”

Her many forays in and through bluegrass were never seen as interloping, and the bluegrass community would respond with near unanimous support. (Which, for bluegrass, ought to be easily rounded up to “unanimous,” with how opinionated and divided its fans can be.) Parton has been nominated for awards by the International Bluegrass Music Association six times in her career since 2000, when she won Album of the Year for The Grass Is Blue. She was also nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year then (and in 2001), but lost both years to, remarkably, Rhonda Vincent. In 2000, she appeared at the annual IBMA Awards show – hosted by her longtime friend and collaborator, Marty Stuart – in Louisville, Kentucky. Audience members, fellow nominees, and performers present that night speak about how kind, funny, and accessible she was then, too. Parton laughed and joked with Stuart at the lectern after performing a track from The Grass Is Blue, clearly right at home among her bluegrass family.

Parton has also won three IBMA Collaborative Recording of the Year awards and most recently two Gospel Recording of the Year trophies for “In the Sweet By and By” (2022, with Carl Jackson, Larry Cordle, Bradley Walker, and Jerry Salley) and “Sacred Memories” (2017, with Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers, Ricky Skaggs, and Sharon White). It’s notable that, despite all of these bluegrass bona fides and accolades, and the universal love felt for Dolly in the bluegrass community – professionally and otherwise – that she’s not been awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the IBMA or inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. One anonymous IBMA elector commented that, to their knowledge, she had not yet at any point even made the ballot for what’s regarded as bluegrass’s highest honor.

If Parton were to be inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, she would join Bill Monroe as the only inductees in history to be honored by the Bluegrass Music, Country Music, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. She is certainly deserving of that honor. While some would argue the Distinguished Achievement Award from IBMA would be a better fit, with its broader scope, it’s indisputable that Dolly Parton meets the criteria for induction into the Hall. The basic standard, the first measuring stick of the IBMA and its panel of electors by which to measure eligibility, reads thusly: “Candidates should be judged according to their contribution to the advancement of bluegrass music and the indelibility of that impact.” Indelible describes it, doesn’t it?

Dolly Parton’s impact goes still beyond her recordings, her network of pickers, her global reach, her awards, and her media appearances. She’s also been an economic driver of her own on a regional and national scale, with Dollywood booking dozens of bluegrass acts each year for their shows, festivals, and special events. It’s a rite of passage in bluegrass to perform at Dollywood, and the bluegrass and country on offer at the park by touring regional and national bands is always first rate. Bands and acts like Della Mae, Willow Osborne, Blue Highway, Sierra Hull, Flatt Lonesome, the Grascals, Hillary Klug, Dailey & Vincent, Doyle Lawson, the Boxcars, and innumerable others have played gigs at Dollywood. Plus, the park employs pickers and musicians for their entire season, local or traveling, to perform daily, some strolling the grounds with their banjos, and others in theatrical shows, revues, or straight-up string bands.

Dolly and her thousands of songs are essential to the bluegrass canon – and the greater American roots music songbook, too. Go to almost any bluegrass show, festival, or jam around the country and you’ll hear folks play her songs. “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” “Wildflowers,” “Silver Dagger,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” and “Smoky Mountain Memories” are just a few of her essential originals fully adopted and absorbed into the bluegrass lexicon. It’s quite the feat to be a songwriter, let alone a successful one, let alone so prolific – but to have your songs regarded as folk songs and also accepted as bluegrass standards? An even rarer feat.

Much ado is made, at length and at regular intervals, about bluegrass as a trend, or bluegrass “having a moment,” or the various bluegrass inflection points in pop culture or commercial music over its near century of history. Folks point to Old & In The Way as the best-selling bluegrass record of all time – until O Brother, Where Art Thou?, of course. Or they point out the astronomical success of Alison Krauss & Union Station, or the huge ticket sales of the post-O Brother Down From the Mountain Tour. Nowadays, we all look to Billy Strings as a harbinger of what’s possible and an indicator of how far the ceiling has been raised on bluegrass’s upper reaches.

From Deliverance or The Beverly Hillbillies, to Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers or Kesha jumping on stage with Mountain Grass Unit, to Billy Strings selling 40,000 tickets in one weekend in one city or Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival packing more than 500,000 fans into Golden Gate Park each fall, bluegrass has its “moment” often. Over and over. On a nearly predictable cycle, listeners and fans pour into this community, finding music they’ll love for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Dolly Parton, one of the most recognizable figures in the entire world – and in the entire history of popular music and commercial music – had been earnestly, consistently, and subtly, despite the rhinestones and false nails and blonde wigs piled to the sky, bringing bluegrass to the masses. Among the many wildflowers she’s grown in the Smoky Mountain meadows of her career, we often lose the old-timey, mountain music, bluegrass “forest for the trees.” Parton had been a proselytizer for bluegrass for more than 70 years, before she even knew she was, and certainly, by the time she reached fame, deliberately and intentionally spreading the bluegrass gospel for the rest of her life.

Dolly Parton’s contributions to bluegrass – as a singer, a musician, a producer, an artist, a performer, a stylist, a storyteller, and as a songwriter – are vast, varied, and essential to this genre. Her love of bluegrass validated the form, and her commitment to propagating and perpetuating the music was one of the most “bluegrass” things about her. With her passing, bluegrass has lost perhaps its most consistent and beloved global ambassador.

Below, go back through the BGS archives and continue to explore Dolly Parton’s rich impact and influence on bluegrass:

Photo courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.

Billy Strings – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Editor

Billy Strings sits down with Tom Power for a special live episode of Toy Heart recorded at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the fall of 2025.

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Billy traces his journey from growing up playing bluegrass with his father to becoming one of the most influential musicians in the genre today. He talks about the moment he rediscovered bluegrass as a teenager, the artists who shaped his playing, including Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Larry Sparks, and Jimmy Martin, and how moving to Traverse City, Michigan, opened his eyes to the possibility of making a living as a musician.

He also reflects on discovering the improvisational side of bluegrass through bands like Greensky Bluegrass and String Cheese Incident, learning to appreciate the Grateful Dead and other forms of improvisational music, and why he believes a great song doesn’t need to be changed to connect with a massive audience.

Billy talks openly about poverty, addiction in his family, and the role music played as a coping mechanism and survival tactic. He explains why he isn’t chasing fame or Grammys as much as he is running away from the life he once knew, and why being an ambassador for bluegrass has become one of his life’s greatest purposes.

Photo Credit: Dana Trippe

The Stanley Brothers Clinch Country’s Top Honor

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

They started playing music as farm-bred young boys growing up amid the Appalachian mountains of Southwestern Virginia, sometimes using sticks of firewood to mime picking banjo and guitar.

A few years later, Ralph and Carter Stanley embarked on a 20-year professional journey as the Stanley Brothers. The music they created starting in 1946 lives on, bringing them widespread fame. It survives in their hundreds of live and studio recordings, and as a deep influence heard in cover performances by artists from Bob Dylan to Billy Strings, Vince Gill to Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris to Ricky Skaggs, Elvis Costello to Dierks Bentley.

Carter, the older brother, lead singer, and guitarist, was born in 1925 and died tragically young in 1966, ending the brothers’ career as a duo. Banjoist and tenor singer Ralph, born in 1927, lived until 2016, building a legendary career of his own.

In March 2026, the Stanley Brothers achieved the highest honor available in this field, membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Their formal induction in October recognizes not only their distinctive body of creative, deep-roots music, but also the strong impact they have had on performers within and outside of bluegrass.

For years, Carter Stanley’s daughter Jeanie had led legions of family and fans to press acceptance of the brothers by the Country Music Association voter pool that picks new Hall of Fame inductees. In regular social media posts, Jeanie described previous bypasses of the act as ridiculous and called upon followers to write and implore CMA insiders to honor her father and uncle.

From a bluegrass point of view, it didn’t make sense to overlook an act recognized as one of a few foundational artists of the style, along with Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs, who were inducted in 1970 and 1985, respectively. But voters in the Veterans category of membership choose among acts eligible 45 years after each emerged in country music. This formula meant that the Stanley Brothers had been eligible since 1991, but also allowed more recent “veteran” stars such as Tanya Tucker to be honored in increasing numbers, with each year that passed.

For all the Stanley Brothers’ authenticity and artistic merit, they only enjoyed one Billboard chart hit, a jokey number called “How Far to Little Rock.” It says something that the Music-City-based CMA honored the brothers even though they never moved to Nashville and never joined the Grand Ole Opry during their years together. (Ralph became a member of the historic show in 2000.)

All of that aside, the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction illustrates their increasing recognition as a cornerstone act, each year growing new legions of followers, both in America and far beyond. String-band-music phenomenon Billy Strings, who regularly performs for houses of more than 10,000 fans, features songs at each show that were first composed or brought to wide attention by Ralph and Carter Stanley. There’s no way to measure how much that exposure means.

Overall, the richness of the Stanleys’ sound and legacy means it pops up over and over again, not just in bluegrass or country settings, but also among pop acts. A story circulates that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards once mouthed “Stanley Brothers!” to a bandmate to illustrate the mournful backup sound he wanted for a performance.

In more formal recognition, the Library of Congress added the brothers’ rendition of the Albert Brumley composition “Rank Stranger” in 2008 to the prestigious National Recording Registry, an annual listing that “highlights the richness of the nation’s audio legacy.”

Elsewhere, “The brothers rose to fame performing traditional religious songs in an Appalachian bluegrass style marked by tight, high-pitched harmonies and strongly influenced by Bill Monroe,” their Encyclopedia Britannica entry reads in part.

Why include this Britannica language, even though it overemphasizes their gospel orientation? The Stanley Brothers’ acknowledgement in a top-rank information source shows the distance the brothers covered during their million-mile journey from a tough childhood, through countless challenges, to creative triumphs that have kept creating new fans in recent years.

Down Home

Born in rural Dickenson County, Virginia, the boys were raised by banjo-picking mother Lucy and ballad-singing father Lee Stanley among mountainside farms and busy lumber camps, living in an atmosphere of homegrown food, spring-drawn water, and lamplit rooms through their early years. Church music, sung unaccompanied in the traditional style, became a mainstay of the brothers’ own music, along with Celtic-derived story songs, neighbors’ country-string music, and eventually the commercial country music heard on a battery-powered radio. The music they learned emerged as what’s now called “pre-bluegrass” until Ralph and Carter first heard the riveting sounds of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry.

Starting out on country radio stations such as Bristol’s legendary WCYB, the Stanley Brothers recorded their early sounds for the busy regional label Rich-R-Tone, then graduated to major labels Columbia and Mercury before winding up on Starday and King, as well as a handful of smaller outlets.

Many standards of bluegrass and country music, such as “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” “The White Dove,” “Rank Stranger,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” “Pretty Polly,” “Harbor of Love,” “Angel Band,” and “Could You Love Me One More Time,” were written or adapted by Carter and Ralph Stanley.

Both brothers wrote songs, but it is Carter who has been recognized as perhaps the most gifted songwriter in the style. It wasn’t until the folk revival and the later country traditionalist movement that Stanley Brothers songs commonly reappeared in versions by other artists.

Covers by the Hundreds

Carter Stanley had co-written songs with bluegrass founder Monroe, and pitched his song “Going to the Races” in 1957 to the recently formed Washington, D.C.-based act the Country Gentlemen. The Gents’ recording of this song, released by the Stanleys in 1958 as “Gonna Paint the Town,” represented an early example of what would become hundreds of the brothers’ songs reflected in other artists’ recordings.

Bob Dylan’s 1962 release of “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” hasn’t been definitively linked to the Stanley Brothers, but decades of the folk legend’s work have reflected their influence. He’s performed a batch of Stanley-connected tunes – including “Hallelujah I’m Ready” and “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” during his endless touring years. Dylan recorded “Rank Strangers” and “Driftin’ Too Far From the Shore” as solos, and “The Lonesome River” in a 1998 duet with Ralph.

Brotherly innovation, including the skyscraping “high-baritone” harmony, influenced members of the West Coast bluegrass scene going back to the 1960s, Byrds founding member Chris Hillman once said in an interview. The striking harmonies produced by Carter and Ralph likely played a role in the two-part sound the Byrds came up with when recording their first hit, Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he said.

The influential Johnson Mountain Boys from the Washington, D.C., area helped move bluegrass back to its roots from a newgrassy direction in the early 1980s, serving up such Stanleys classics as “I Don’t Want Your Rambling Letters,” “Harbor of Love,” and “Our Last Goodbye.”

Elvis Costello, an artist who shook pop music in the 1970s, has been best known for hard-hitting, sometimes abrasive New Wave pop and rock. In a 2015 interview with New York Times writer A.O. Scott, Costello remembered early days embracing all sorts of country music: “From the ’70s through the mid-’80s, I absorbed all the American music, not just country music like Nashville country music or Bakersfield country music, but older, more traditional styles, even the Stanley Brothers and that stuff.”

Jammin’ Stanley-style

Before Billy Strings arose, a swath of bluegrass artists brought awareness of the Stanley Brothers to new generations of fans through cover renditions. The Grateful Dead, especially co-founder Jerry Garcia, cited the Stanleys as an inspirational source, adding fuel to the jam-band movement that in recent years has brought giant crowds to bluegrass.

Del McCoury, also a Stanleys believer, draws mighty crowds to his festival, DelFest, where mashups of straight bluegrass and Dead-driven improvisational bands are common. Bluesy Larry Sparks, a onetime member of the Stanleys’ Clinch Mountain Boys band, cooks up his own mix of gospel, country and ‘grass, also citing the brothers’ influence on any music he produces.

Fellow Country Music Hall of Fame members Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley also served as key testifiers to the greatness of Ralph and Carter Stanley.

Disciples since their youth, Skaggs and Whitley were overheard by Ralph Stanley in 1970 singing note-for-note recreations of the duets of Ralph and Carter. Ralph was an hour late to his own gig, due to a flat tire; when he arrived, he initially thought the venue was playing a Stanley Brothers recording. Still in their teens, they would go on to tour, record and release music with Ralph Stanley as members of the Clinch Mountain Boys.

After a starry career as a bluegrass sideman, Skaggs had early hits as a solo country artist that included versions of the brothers’ “I’ll Take the Blame” and “Could You Love Me One More Time.” His 1997 roots-return CD, Bluegrass Rules, a Grammy winner, included a large helping of Stanleys numbers, including “Think of What You’ve Done” and “Midnight Train.” In concert appearances years before the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction, Skaggs paid tribute to the act and talked about how richly they deserved the honor.

Emmylou Harris, Skaggs’s onetime employer in her Hot Band, also helped advance the Stanleys’ legend through her recording of their songs. Her dedication to country and bluegrass produced cuts of “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn” and “Who Will Sing for Me.” Harris even took part in a gospel album and act called “Angel Band” along with Vince Gill, Emory Gordy Jr., and Carl Jackson. And Harris and Skaggs joined voices on the Stanleys’ “Could You Love Me (One More Time),” on Skaggs’s first solo album in 1979.

Why the Stanleys?

There’s more to the long reach of the Stanley Brothers even than the captivating sounds of the brothers’ voices, the hard-hitting stories of their songs, and the driving rhythm of their instrumentals. Fans sum it up as authenticity.

When country music veered into steel-driven honky-tonk and later the smoothness of the Nashville sound, the Stanley Brothers stuck mostly to the music they’d come up with in their early days. Oh, there was the steel guitar of “If That’s the Way You Feel,” the Elvis-esque sounds of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the R&B side-trip of “Finger Poppin’ Time,” but Ralph and Carter stayed almost entirely acoustic, always leaning on their hardcore mountain sound, true to their rural roots.

This quality of authenticity touched countless musicians and fans on first hearing. Patty Loveless shared an IBMA Award with Ralph Stanley for their recording of “Pretty Polly” on the all-star Clinch Mountain Country album and even helped inducted him into the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in January 2000. Released later that year, the inclusion of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” (newly recorded by the Foggy Bottom Boys) and the a cappella rendition of “O Death” by Ralph Stanley were highlights on the multi-million-selling soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, bringing new attention to their style of roots music.

For a California punk musician named Gillian Welch, one Stanley Brothers cassette was all it took for her to find “her music.” In 2018, Americana star Welch and partner David Rawlings were among the performers at an evening tribute to Ralph and the Stanley Brothers at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with country star Dierks Bentley as host. The event was a celebration of a Ralph Stanley exhibition opening at the museum.

That night, Bentley brought on the Traveling McCourys, the act starring Del’s boys and other musicians, as well as the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Others on the show included Ralph Stanley’s son, known as Ralph II, bluegrass duo the Gibson Brothers, and the hot-picking Justin Moses and Sierra Hull.

The evening of music from a diverse group of performers shone with songs such as “I’ll Just Go Away,” “Could You Love Me One More Time,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” and the first Stanleys hit, “Little Glass of Wine.” It reflected a theme universal to myriads of musicians and fans, that the Stanley Brothers’ music hits so hard and so deep that it has served as a foundation for followers going back generations.

“Some of the first songs I ever saw played on a guitar were Stanley Brothers songs,” Auerbach said, according to Rolling Stone.

Closer to the present and into the future, Compass Records this year announced an all-star tribute album marking the 80th anniversary of the Stanley Brothers’ debut as a performing act in 1946. Last year, the label gave a hint of the disc’s content with a single release of “Ralph’s Banjo Special” featuring Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt, and Alison Brown.

Through the years, fans have treasured the forthright values of the Stanley Brothers and admired the ways they combined the traditional music they loved with creative new ways of addressing those sounds. Sad to say, the Stanley Brothers endured some hard times just to play the music they had fashioned, instead of changing their sound to follow the whims of music-business fashion. Carter once addressed their steadfast point of view with a note in a publication written to be mailed to their fans.

“For the past few years, we have tried to bring to you country people the kind of entertainment you enjoy,” Carter wrote. “In doing this we have been criticized by some for not being more modern. Since we were raised with this old-time music as part of our background, we have never had and still do not feel any desire to change our way of playing.”

Sticking to their guns remained the Stanley Brothers’ trademark through their two decades of touring, performing, and recording together. Some 60 years after Carter’s death ended those years, the Stanley Brothers’ legacy has paid off for them with membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame among country music’s most highly esteemed acts.

Photo courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.

The Importance of Scholar and Author Robert S. Cantwell

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Robert S. Cantwell died on July 3, and for people who write about country or folk – and for people who play these musics – this was a major loss. Cantwell grew up on the South Side of Chicago and went to school at the legendary Grinnell College in Iowa. He spent his time at Grinnell learning how to play the banjo, though frequently he would be fined by the college for playing after hours. Committing to a lifetime of writing, he wrote mostly about country and folk music, but in ways that were difficult, all-encompassing, eccentric, and curious. He never really believed in the purity of form, but also was careful about what popular music meant. For decades, mostly in North Carolina, he was writing and teaching about music where legend was more often printed than the truth. Cantwell knew the truth was polyvalent. And slippery.

He writes carefully in one section of Bluegrass Breakdown about what church music means, tracing the sanctification of hillbilly music all the way through Appalachia to Calvinist psalters in Scottish churches. At the same time, he was one the earliest white critics to note that the history of the banjo came from West Africa, but the theft of the banjo, as an instrument and a music, was abetted by vaudeville and burlesque, places where blackface was rampant. These two examples note the public and social problems of the music, but also note that the public performances of these spaces was as much in an oral as written tradition, and that bluegrass requires a performance orientation.

This move towards understanding performance as central to the genre also allowed for a chapter in Bluegrass Breakdown about Bill Monroe at the Grand Ole Opry, an exquisitely reported backstage report. That chapter is so well observed, not through the top-down hierarchy of an academic who needs to pretend that he knows all, but through noting carefully what he does know (the origins of Bill Monroe’s “High Lonesome Sound”), what he doesn’t know (who Jean Shepard was outside of her stage clothes), or what cannot be known entirely (the social pressure of the Opry as a site of country music.)

Cantwell’s observations come out of concerns, a careful listening, which suggest that genre is less important than a loving discussion of what music is, as it is listened to now, and how it has been listened to historically. Cantwell can follow that backstage passage, with its shade of ’70s-style New Journalism, with a discussion of what Monroe was actually playing – and I mean this culturally, but also via actual notation. But he follows that with an annihilating anecdote against an anonymous scholar who argued that bluegrass must result from written sources. He further argues that it is one kind of music, one kind of genre – though not one that is central to the conversation – acknowledging the legitimacy of the form, but asking why the performer would only allow one kind of knowledge.

Cantwell was included in fellow critic Eric Weisbard’s magisterial volume on music criticism, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, a book that features almost every important book of music criticism. Weisbard writes about Cantwell’s Bluegrass Breakdown: “Folklore almost dissolved in Cantwell’s antidisciplinary, antigenre, anti (as prose) generic accounting,” then spends the rest of the entry almost walking back what could be considered an accusation – recognizing that if bluegrass was supposed to be a melting-pot genre, then writing about bluegrass should be equally anti-genre. Bluegrass at its best is both pure and filthy; singing about plain truths in flashy suits. Work that happened within written or oral traditions requires a systematic dismantling of the genre, reworking it with new disciplines and stranger understandings.

This is where I say that Cantwell argues – and he does that sometimes – but he also tells stories, and pays attention, and works out some problems about the rise of bluegrass. He considers Bill Monroe central, but uses Monroe as a larger example that the genre is a commercial construction, one that has an origin in a wide variety of oral and written traditions. Bluegrass – and I think by extension folk and country music – is a bastard child with many parents, and Cantwell at his best elucidates all of them.

His other work is equally dense. He traces the entire history of the 1960s folk revival in the ironic and telling When We Were Good, which deconstructs genre as aptly as Bluegrass Breakdown does. His last book, The Poetics of Tenderness, is about how much he loves his wife, but also about how to read with an all-consuming love–and according to its press copy it quotes “Andreas Capellanus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Hardy, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard, among others.” That might be the central gift of understanding Cantwell, understanding that to love something is to consume it – with tenderness and with ravenous hunger.

In his death, we not only lose a singular voice in American popular music criticism, but we also experience a loss in how exactly to write about genre, and about bluegrass. We lose someone who dedicated care to research, but also with the patience and space to consider work over centuries. In the systematic dismantling of humanities, and in the academic gatekeeping which forbids working-class people from writing about working-class music, Cantwell’s death seems deeply symbolic – of how rare writing this patient and erudite is now.

 

Artist of the Month: Dailey & Vincent

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Since they were boys, Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent have been surrounded by music. As a child, Dailey sang with his father, who was in a gospel group. Vincent performed at a young age with his family’s bluegrass gospel band, the Sally Mountain Show (which included his older sister, Rhonda Vincent). In 1990, he joined the John Hartford Band and then, in 1996, the multi-instrumentalist and singer signed up with Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder for nearly a decade. In 1999, Dailey started his successful nine-year run in the esteemed bluegrass group Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver as a tenor and baritone vocalist, and played acoustic bass before moving into rhythm guitar.

Dailey & Vincent met at the IBMA’s annual business conference and festival in 2001 and became quick friends. One day, after having breakfast at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, they went to Dailey’s car to listen to a tape of a song he had written. When they sang along to it, the two realized that their voices blended together in an uncanny way. It took several years for them to leave their respective groups and officially become a duo.

Along the way, they contributed the track “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” to a Christmas compilation and that tune hit No. 1 on the Prime Cuts of Bluegrass charts. Dailey & Vincent then scored a deal with Rounder Records based on a demo they submitted. Since 2007, they have released 11 albums (including A Beautiful Life, released in June), won multiple SPBGMA and IBMA awards, and received several GRAMMY nominations. They also host a TV series, and have attracted a devoted following for their mix of traditional and contemporary musical styles that draws upon bluegrass, country, and gospel.

From September 17 to 19, the two are again hosting their annual Dailey & Vincent Music Fest. Held in Hiawassee, Georgia, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the festival’s lineup this year includes friends and family like Ricky Skaggs, Rhonda Vincent, and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, as well as Lonesome River Band, Seldom Scene, Gene Watson, and Wyatt Ellis – with Dailey & Vincent performing different sets each day.

To celebrate A Beautiful Life, we’ve named Dailey & Vincent our BGS Artist of the Month in August. Enjoy our exclusive AOTM interview with the duo below and don’t miss our Essential Dailey & Vincent Playlist, too. Plus, keep an eye on our website and social media for even more D&V content all month long.

When you all were creating your new album, A Beautiful Life, did you go in with an intention to make a certain type of album? Because your records frequently have had some type of theme or concept – like your prior release, 2022’s Let’s Sing Some Country.

Jamie Dailey: For me, it was not a themed record at all. I think Darrin and I both feel the same way. We just wanted the best songs that we could get our hands on to record. By being with Morris Higham [Management] and our manager Robert Filhart having the tie-in to the publishing companies to help us with songs, that gave us a whole new breath of life to be able to get a hold of some really great songs. And so that’s kind of how we were looking at it. We were not thinking about a theme at all.

Darrin Vincent: We’re able to create the bluegrass and the country music feel on the same record. But it’s mostly acoustically based. One of the coolest things about those elements was our management saying, “Go out and create the best songs and the best record you guys can. Don’t worry about [the album being] branded at anything or themed at anything. Just go make yourself a record.” And that’s kind of our mindset, and what we did with that encouragement.

How did you find these songs come together?

JD: Our manager, Rob Filhart … took us to Music Row and set us in publishing offices with speakers on both sides of our heads and a person across from us. They would play song after song after song, and you would listen to one and you’d be like, “No, that’s not it.” They’d play another one. “No, that’s not it.” And then a song came on and it was, “Wake up in the morning to a big orange sun/ Calling in sick, gonna have a little fun…” I thought, “Wait, wait, wait, what is that?” I want to keep listening. And it was “A Beautiful Life.”

One of the reasons that we love the song is that both of us have lived that lyric. Growing up, we have lived that lyric and still live a lot of it today. So that song touched our hearts and touched who we are as human beings. And we thought, “Man, we’ve got to record that song.”

We kept listening to more and more songs. Then they played us the song that was written by Don Schlitz and Josh Kear called “I Grew Up in Heaven.” Once again, we’re sitting there and I’m like, “I grew up in a beautiful rural area with the hills and the mountains and lakes and the rivers and bluffs and wildlife.” And I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I’ve lived this lyric” – and so has Darrin, you know? We fell in love with that. So, we thought, “Well, that’s going to be a good song.”

DV: We actually recorded 16 of the songs and those 12 [on the album] seemed to fit together the best. We got four other songs we haven’t even finished yet, but they’re great songs as well. We need to probably look at those at some point, but these really fit together well. I’m so thankful for them.

“Ruby” makes for a tremendous lead-off track. How did that get in the album?

JD: We got a call from the Grand Ole Opry, and they were going to recreate a show from 1974. They said, “We want you guys to come in and sing an Osborne Brothers song and a Jim & Jesse song and recreate a night that they were on this stage. You have to say what they said that night and you have to sing one of their songs.” They gave us choices. Darrin picked the song “Paradise” from Jim & Jesse. And I picked the song “Ruby.” I didn’t really want to sing “Ruby,” because it’s really high. It’s really fast and it’s really hard. I’m going to be honest, I was extremely intimidated by the song.

We sang the song on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium during the Grand Ole Opry. And the crowd went bonkers. I mean, bonkers from the front to the middle of the back! We thought, “What is going on?” And I simply think it was because they enjoyed watching me trying to kill myself singing. But when we came off stage we said, “Man, what a reaction! You know, it really doesn’t lend itself to the record, but people loved it so much. It might be a great opener to the record – loose and fast and high and all the things.” So, we decided to do it and lo and behold, it went No. 1 [for multiple weeks on the Bluegrass Today charts].

DV: My favorite thing is to watch Jamie kick off “Ruby” and see the people’s reaction to that. They’re just absolutely floored and that the reaction is so cool. I don’t think they’ve ever seen anything like it. It’s awesome.

The album has a good number of songs, like “A Beautiful Life,” that have a soulful, soul-feeding quality. Not just in a religious way, necessarily. Like “God’s Country,” you might think it is a religious song but it’s just about praising – praising where you come from.

JD: Yeah, and the place that I come from, everybody has different beliefs here. They have different political backgrounds. The song is for everybody. It’s not just for one set group of people. It’s for everybody because I love everybody. I mean, if you’re a nice person and try hard and treat people right, then I love you. I don’t have an issue with anybody.

When you started off as a duo, your first show was the Grand Ole Opry, right?

JD: We’ve played the Opry a lot. Darrin had played it longer than I had. But we both played the Opry a lot in other bands we’d been in. And then as Dailey & Vincent, we started our career off there. Darrin can tell you about us turning down dates just so we could play something like the Opry.

DV: Yeah, we had a manager by the name of Don Light who really, really put us under his wing and really gave us great advice. Advice we’re still using today after all these years. After we quit [working with] Ricky and Doyle, or we turned in our notice … we were getting all these offers of really good money to go out and play. Don Light said, “Boys, there’s only one first. I really believe your first [performance] needs to be at the Grand Ole Opry.” He said, “I know you all could use the money and it’s nice to have money,” but he said, “It’s more important for the longevity of you guys to make that Grand Ole Opry your first performance.”

Jamie and I agreed to it, we said no to everybody, and just kind of hung on to that. The thing of it is we weren’t promised [the Opry gig]. Pete Fisher [Opry VP/GM at the time] did not promise, “Yes, you guys can make your debut at the Grand Ole Opry.”

JD: It was a gamble.

DV: He and I took a gamble. We said no to everybody and, man, are we ever glad we did! ‘Cause we can honestly say our very first paid performances were the Grand Ole Opry. The Ryman, no less, of all stages. The birth of bluegrass music [was there], started with Bill Monroe. Isn’t that something? That’s really something!

JD: And we had to eat beanie weenies for about four months, but, you know, we’re alive now. We made it.

You both have been performing music since you were children, and been professionals for a long time. Besides having a lifelong love of music, it seems like you have a respect for the profession of being a musician.

DV: We’ve been recording records for a long time and have been on wonderful projects. Jamie grew up with his dad playing music and I did the same thing with my mom and dad. I think that my very first recording was at age five. So, we’ve been doing this a long time. I tell people this is not a hobby. It’s our job and our life and our livelihood, and man, it’s our DNA. It’s the way we grew up, and being members of the Grand Ole Opry and just being able to carry on that legacy of our family tree is really, really important. … It’s what we’ve done all of our lives. My wife, as a child, wanted to be a teacher and be in education. For us, this is our job, yes – but it’s more than that. It’s our life. I mean, this music, this record, is our life.

I think there’s some people that do it for a hobby, and that’s wonderful. But for us, our job is to get music, songs that will help people. I mean, we’re basically therapists as well. I can’t tell you the number of people that come through our line that are going through chemotherapy or some kind of issue in their life. This music is therapeutic – especially “A Beautiful Life.” I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “That just makes me happy listening to those lyrics.” I feel like we’re sometimes musical doctors as well.

Harmony singing has always been important to you, and to the history of bluegrass. Jamie, I know the Statler Brothers were a huge influence on you. How do you see the state of harmony vocals in bluegrass music today? Is there a resurgence or are you just like holding the torch?

JD: Okay, we may have two different answers… How I’m going to answer this, I want everyone to know, I don’t mean this negative at all. This is just something that I’m seeing – and I could be wrong, okay? I’ll be the first to admit it. I am seeing more great pickers and a lot of picking now than I am, per se, a lot of great, top-notch vocal art. Now, yes, there are lots of people out there doing it, but it used to be that I saw more of that than I did a lot of the hot picking. It seems to me that’s what I’m seeing now. Folks, I could be wrong. Okay? If I am, please point me in direction so I can learn. But that’s what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing. So I found that to be interesting. Darrin, how do you feel?

DV: Yeah, you know, [Jamie] and I are always going to do four-part harmony, if possible. I never ever did four-part harmony with my family group all those years. With Ricky [Skaggs], we would have “Remember the Cross,” the Bill Monroe song, with the bassist in Ricky’s band doing the Bill Monroe quartet kind of thing. Of course, now Jamie, being with Doyle in those nine years, that was absolutely Doyle Lawson’s sound, the four-part harmony gospel. We have since moved back to three-part harmony, and we’ve been having Kyle [Ramey], our banjo player, do the bass part. I think Jamie and I will always do duets, trios, all the different types of songs, because that’s our DNA, that’s part of bluegrass’s DNA as well, all the way back to Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe. It’s just something that’s part of bluegrass. I think that people need to hear that and we certainly feature that on our TV show. It’s very important and it’s just a cool thing to hear.

It also feels like you two are at an interesting traditionalist/non-traditionalist intersection, where you respect and follow some traditional leads, but also listen to your own inner voices of what you want to sound like.

JD: That has been a craw with some people on the traditional side. You know, “What are you guys? You used to be bluegrass, but we can’t really call you bluegrass. But you’re not really country, so we can’t call you that. What are you?” And all we know to tell them is: Dailey & Vincent! We sing and play the songs that we like and love. We play and sing the styles that we like and love. And we play and sing the way that we play and sing. We don’t know what that is, other than it’s just us. It’s how we think. How we breathe. It’s just who we are. And that’s not a good answer for a lot of people. They don’t like that answer, but honestly, we really don’t know how else to answer it.

You’ve finished your tenth season of your TV show. How has the TV show fit in with or affected your overall music career? Like, has it improved your live show?

JD: One of the things that I am so thankful for about the television show is, of course, we get to sing our bluegrass songs, whether they’re covers or originals that we’ve written. We get to sing a lot of the country songs that we like – original or covers. But something I have loved, it has given me the ability to sing songs like Bryan Adams’ “Heaven.” I’ve been able to sing Christopher Cross’s “Sailing.” I’ve been able to sing Sting’s “Fields of Gold.” All these old pop songs.

It’s given me an avenue to get that side of my fanboy out on all these pop songs and get to sing them and put them out. It’s interesting. When we have put them on social media, I have been very clear in my wording of, “Hey, one of the reasons we love to get to do our television show is we get to sing songs we’ve always wanted to sing, but that we never really could put on a record or necessarily really sing on a stage somewhere.” So, that has been one of the most fun parts for me. Darrin, how about you?

DV: I’ve loved being able to sing different songs and create different musical settings for different songs. Even songs that we did bluegrass, we go back into country now and just flip it around. It’s just wonderful being on the creating side of the musical side of that with these songs.

For me personally, I love all that and creating, but I’ve always been behind the vocalists in my group. It was my dad and my sister Rhonda. When I went with John Hartford, it was John. He was the frontman. He was the voice. Ricky, he was the voice. Jamie’s a great MC and a great frontman. But in our group now, I have to walk out and do more lead vocals and do more talking. And being a part of the Grand Ole Opry and this TV show has really set me to be out front, to be more of a talker. I’m more of a thinker on that side of it. Jamie is great off the cuff. I have to think about what I say and then I have to try to make it feel correct. I struggle with that.

JD: [Laughing] I probably should think about what I said!

DV: I’m not ashamed of this. I spent my whole entire life in special ed. Education was very hard for me. Being in the background is more where I like to be. I love being on the backside of things and I don’t need the spotlight. But since it’s Dailey & Vincent, Jamie and I both go out there, but those [TV show] settings have helped me to try to be more outgoing. I love that Jamie’s very outgoing. He’s such a great speaker and it has really encouraged me to try to do better at that. He’s absolutely the best, but I feel like I have grown because of those platforms to be able to speak better. My thought process goes a little quicker now and I feel more comfortable with it, and I’m sure grateful for that.

Photo Credit: Gregg Roth

A Jamgrass Chronology

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Dichotomy. The essence of jamgrass is the intersection of traditional and progressive ideals, techniques, and tones when it comes to the musical hot potato that is bluegrass – past, present, and future.

Throughout the generations, and within the structured lines of bluegrass, there’s a constant segment of the genre that remains eternally curious about what lies just beyond the horizon. It’s this sonic landscape of unlimited possibilities and creative fulfillment, one where the whirlwind attitudes of psychedelic rock, freeform jazz, classical music, and country gold were injected into the “high, lonesome sound,” ultimately conjuring this new melodic avenue to duck down.

The First Generation

When looking at the origins of jamgrass, the “Big Bang of Progressive Bluegrass” arguably occurred with the formation of New Grass Revival in 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky. Led by fiddler/mandolinist Sam Bush and banjoist Courtney Johnson, the outfit emerged from the ashes of another group, Bluegrass Alliance. This revolutionary quartet combined traditional bluegrass with contemporary influences from the popular rock, country and jazz of the period, the result being their self-titled debut album in 1972. In later years, bassist John Cowan and banjoist Béla Fleck would be added to the lineup.

By the early 1970s, the Earl Scruggs Revue was already well-established on the national touring circuit. With the Western North Carolina banjo great himself at the helm, Scruggs and his two sons, guitarist Randy and bassist Gary, embraced the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scruggs not only was outspoken in his support of the anti-Vietnam movement, he also happily and genuinely welcomed those from other musical circles, including playing gigs alongside rock acts The Byrds and Steppenwolf.

Although not necessarily considered jamgrass, the Revue – with Scruggs being a vital pillar of the first generation of bluegrass as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys – opened doors into an often-heavily guarded realm of traditional bluegrass. One where the fear of outsiders taking over the scene without “proper knowledge or respect” to the unspoken rules and traditions of the genre could be seen as misguided intent versus building a bigger space for more folks to tap into the history of the music and evolve their own craft, the end result being the survival and perpetuation of bluegrass.

In April 1972, the Revue’s album I Saw the Light with Some Help from My Friends featured guest appearances by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Arlo Guthrie, and Linda Ronstadt. The sessions would inspire Nitty Gritty to eventually pursue its own collaborative project, which became the seminal album Will the Circle be Unbroken – the record now regarded as a pillar of the bluegrass and country music scenes in the decades since its release in November 1972.

That winter of 1972/1973 conjured the happenstance formation of acoustic supergroup Old & In The Way. Guitarist Peter Rowan and mandolinist David Grisman, longtime friends and collaborators, found themselves at the home of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in Stinson Beach, California. As expected, impromptu pickin’-n-grinnin’ sessions ensued.

“We started picking every night after supper [at Jerry’s],” Rowan told BGS in a 2022 interview. “We went through old song books and learned a bunch of material.”

By the early 1970s, the Dead had become one of the premier rock bands in America. Even though he was now a bonafide rock star with a massive legion of diehard fans, Garcia yearned for a simpler time in his life, which was his existence before the band itself, when he was a young, hungry bluegrass musician in the San Francisco folk scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Soon after, the trio tapped bassist John Kahn and a revolving cast of fiddlers (Richard Greene, John Hartford, Vassar Clements) and booked a handful of gigs around the Bay Area in 1973. There were no expectations set or boundaries drawn. The gatherings were more about honoring musicianship and friendship, where all present could play joyously in the sandbox together.

Old & In The Way only lasted a little more than a year, disappearing in the spring of 1974 without any fanfare or real notice of its demise. The group was kind of like a comet flying by in the night sky — bright and stunning, and yet all too fleeting, but you counted your lucky stars you were able to see and appreciate it in real time, onstage and in the audience.

And that special time and place that was Old & In The Way would be forever captured in recordings of the live shows. In 1975, the self-titled debut album was released and became the biggest selling bluegrass album of all-time until it was overtaken by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack in 2000.

“In bluegrass, you just do the beautiful grace of presenting the music, being good neighbors and all that stuff,” Rowan says. “But you could hear us in the band going, ‘go, man, go.’ Go for it, that’s where we came from. That’s what Old and In the Way was – the ‘go for it’ signal to everybody.”

The final piece to the puzzle that is the first generation of jamgrass was filled when Hot Rize emerged in the late 1970s in Boulder, Colorado. Coming together while all being employed at the Denver Folklore Center, fiddler/mandolinist Tim O’Brien, banjoist Pete Wernick, guitarist Charles Sawtelle and bassist Nick Forster would become the pioneers of the Colorado jamgrass scene – ultimately launching countless bands in The Centennial State with their unique blend of traditional tones and innovative styles.

The Second Generation

Just like O’Brien, Leftover Salmon guitarist Vince Herman was also a West Virginia native who headed west to the Rocky Mountains in search of his musical destiny. In 1985, Herman dropped out of West Virginia University and decided to “go to Colorado and find like-minded players.” This single decision by Herman ushered in the second generation of jamgrass.

“And I knew there was a progressive bluegrass scene based around the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Hot Rize was in Boulder, which was a major influence on me,” Herman told BGS in a 2025 interview. “So, I figured Boulder would have a good progressive bluegrass scene. And it sure did, proven by pulling up and seeing a ‘Live Bluegrass Music Tonight’ sign [at a bar].”

That night in Boulder in 1985, Herman wandered in and crossed paths with multi-instrumentalist Drew Emmitt. The two were kindred spirits and immediately hit it off, with Herman eventually joining Emmitt’s Left Hand String Band. A year later, Herman launched his own band, The Salmon Heads. But, it would be New Year’s Eve 1989 when Leftover Salmon came to fruition, the ensemble being a combination of the duo’s respective band members.

“We stuck with Leftover Salmon for the first night, never knowing it would be any more than one night of a gig [in Crested Butte],” Herman says of the NYE show. “The older the tune, the more the bluegrass stomp kind of thing would go on, people would slam dance. We were like, ‘Something’s good about this.’”

By 1993, another Colorado band came rolling down the ski slopes of Crested Butte and Telluride. Formed as a casual gathering of acoustic musicians and a percussionist looking to get together during après-ski and play some tunes for free lift tickets and cold beer, the String Cheese Incident took bluegrass and pushed it more into the jamband world than any other group who came before them. Nowadays, the sextet is a glorious kitchen sink of sound and scope – bluegrass to blues, rock to reggae, jazz to jam-tronica – especially through their highly popular annual festivals, Electric Forest and Hulaween.

Heading towards the end of the century, Yonder Mountain String Band appeared on the scene in Nederland, Colorado, in 1998. The quartet originally featured a mesmerizing frontman in the late Jeff Austin, an ambitious and endlessly curious mandolin player. The core of the band was based more in traditional bluegrass, but with a heavy focus on improvisation and just seeing where the night took them. The culmination of which led to Yonder finding itself in this unique position, one that allowed the group to be booked at both lawnchair bluegrass festivals and wild-n-out jamband gatherings across America.

The Third Generation

The new millennium signaled the third generation of jamgrass. On Oct. 31, 2000, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a casual Halloween gig consisting of college buddies (who played the local bluegrass open mic night at the Blue Dolphin) would parlay itself into the creation of Greensky Bluegrass – an ensemble equally obsessed with Tony Rice and David Grisman as they were the Grateful Dead and Phish.

A few years ago, when I was interviewing frontman Paul Hoffman about the initial intent of Greensky, he replied, “To play heavy metal music on acoustic instruments.” And in the quarter-century since its inception, Greensky has become a marquee act. They blurred the lines between bluegrass and jambands, ultimately setting the stage for every band who came thereafter with ambitions to rock big venues, all in the name of jamgrass exploration.

“I think that we just have a spirit to not be limited,” Hoffman told BGS in a 2025 interview. “So, if we want to emulate all the things we love – and we’d love a diverse amount of things, musical things – we honor the acoustic nature of our heritage as a band, but we want so much more. We want [things] to keep us interested and engaged. We’ve allowed ourselves that creative freedom to try anything.”

On the other side of the Great Lakes, in Duluth, Minnesota, Trampled by Turtles formed by happenstance in 2003 on a tiny stage at Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake. A hearty blend of bluegrass, indie-folk and alt-country influences, Trampled’s sound has been described as “Midwestern Gothic” – a musical signature ultimately straddling the barriers between genres of distinct sounds and approaches.

The third generation is rounded out by the Infamous Stringdusters, coming together in 2006 in Nashville. Consisting of longtime road musicians and recent graduates of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the group is a meticulous balance of tradgrass and jamgrass. With their core soaked in the principles of traditional bluegrass, the Dusters have never wavered from chasing their artistic muse towards the unknown horizon of Americana and rock influences that run deep in their sound.

“That’s what’s so beautiful about bluegrass music, in particular,” fiddler Jeremy Garrett told BGS in a 2026 interview. “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.”

The Fourth & Fifth Generations

That transitional time in jamgrass of the early 2000s and 2010s sparked what is currently being considered the highwater mark of the genre – and also regarded as the fourth generation of jamgrass – as seen by guitar phenom Billy Strings bursting into the arena level, with Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull right in the mix when it comes to bluegrass spilling into the mainstream.

Also emerging from the same Michigan scene as Greensky Bluegrass, Strings’ rocketship ride from hardscrabble beginnings to selling out any size of venue from coast to coast is the stuff of legend. Only in the summer years of his career, Strings’ playful flexibility around “bluegrass rules” is mirrored by his genuine respect for those who came before him. His knowledge of the genre is as profound as the unknown depths of his skillset and ambition, something witnessed each night he performs for an endless sea of faces.

For Hull and Tuttle, they became the first female musicians to be given the IBMA award for Mandolin Player of the Year (Hull) and Guitar Player of the Year (Tuttle). To note, Hull has now been given the honor seven times in the last 10 years. Both artists are becoming well-known for genre-bending collaborations with a fearlessness in entering new artistic realms – Hull jamming alongside Slash and Cory Wong, with Tuttle shifting into the indie-folk and alt-country scenes as of late.

Where we stand at this exact juncture is considered the fifth generation of jamgrass – a level represented by young, hungry and immensely-talented bands eager to learn, eager to rise to the occasion on the live stage – with the likes of Mountain Grass Unit, Clay Street Unit, Shadowgrass, and Magoo putting down quickly-growing roots in the scene due to impressive appearances in front of massive crowds on the festival circuit in recent years.

“We’re a live band. It’s where we really shine through, and you can just feel the energy up there. We always try to say, ‘There are only so many Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights,’ and we want to elevate that and bring the energy and the emotion and let [the audience] loose,” Clay Street Unit guitarist Sam Walker told BGS in a 2026 interview. “We want to make sure at every show we’re bringing that to the table, our full attention to the energy and making sure that everyone’s having as good a time as they can.”

In the last 55 years or so of the jamgrass movement, the sheer beauty of the genre is the mere fact that many of the architects and torchbearers are still walking this earth, still touring and proudly collaborating with the younger generations, and always offering a real sense of encouragement to happily take risks and not be afraid of what could be, onstage and in the studio – for true gratitude resides in the ancient desire to find one’s truth and purpose.

Continue exploring our Jamgrass in July coverage here. This content brought to you in partnership with Preston Thompson Guitars.

Photo Credit: Leftover Salmon by Tobin Voggesser.

The Origins and Evolution of Jamgrass – And Where It Goes From Here

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Whether it’s Bill Monroe, Sam Bush, Sister Sadie, or Billy Strings, bluegrass has always pushed boundaries. At the forefront of that movement sits jamgrass, which brings together a barrage of influences performed with grassy, stringed arrangements and an improvisational sensibility that makes each song and show feel like a living organism – and results in each performance having its own qualities and quirks.

However, despite many tying the origins of jamgrass to ’90s upstarts like Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String Band, its roots actually go back at least a half-century – and in some cases to the very origins of bluegrass music itself.

“When Bill Monroe started the Blue Grass Boys and they came on the Grand Ole Opry with that band, they were so far removed and different from other string bands of that same era even though they had the same instrumentation,” says Bush. “They were light years ahead of all the rest of the music on the Grand Ole Opry in terms of progressiveness and innovation, so in his own way Bill Monroe was a rebel. The Opry audience was just astounded with the way they played, and then when Bill introduced a great fiddler like Chubby Wise and the banjo playing of Earl Scruggs, that’s what kicked what we call bluegrass into gear.”

That same trailblazing spirit of Monroe could also be found in Bush himself several decades later, with the formation of the Bluegrass Alliance and, shortly after, New Grass Revival. The latter went against the grain of traditional bluegrass in nearly every way imaginable, from covers of Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Marley, and The Beatles to their long hair and the tie-dye they dressed themselves in. All more akin to Deadheads and the hippie movement than bluegrass at the time. Per Bush, the group was inspired by bands that had already deviated from the old-time ways of bluegrass like the Osborne Brothers, Jim & Jesse, the Country Gentlemen, the Dillards, the Greenbriar Boys, Area Code 615, and even John Hartford – who he’d later pay tribute to with his 2022 album Radio John.

That being said, New Grass Revival and the movement they helped spark also held the tradition of bluegrass in as high regard as anyone, even as the band pushed the music in a direction it had never been before. “We always said that if you want to play newgrass, you first have to know how to play bluegrass,” recalls Bush.

The band’s rise gave way to the progressive leaning newgrass movement that saw an influx of outside influences and experimentation flood into the music that Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys made famous, with one of the most notable being Leftover Salmon. Formed in 1989 – the same year New Grass Revival first broke up – in Boulder, Colorado, Salmon brought together acoustic and electric arrangements with percussion to create an offshoot of newgrass they coined “Cajun slamgrass.” The outfit’s hybrid sound was an instant hit, and by the early ’90s the band found itself on the H.O.R.D.E tour with rock and jam bands like Phish, Widespread Panic, Spin Doctors, and Blues Traveler. This further connected the worlds of bluegrass and jam, resulting in what many refer to as the official launch of the jamgrass movement later in the decade when Yonder Mountain String Band burst onto the scene.

In fact, Yonder’s bassist, Ben Kaufmann, recalls attending that H.O.R.D.E tour and credits it for sending him down the rabbit hole of bluegrass. But being from Boston and growing up a Deadhead, he knew that any music he’d go on to create would be radically different from what had come before it.

“We didn’t grow up in the rural South,” explains Kaufmann. “We were suburban kids, which was critical to whatever Yonder ended up achieving. If we weren’t, the band likely would’ve leaned much more traditional. We thought the music of Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and the Stanley Brothers were the coolest things ever, even though it was born out of an environment that’s not ours.

“That, combined with the influences of our formative years, helped to mold our own little version of what a bluegrass band could be, even though not everyone thought it was the ‘right’ way to play it. For a while the bluegrass community didn’t want any part of us, which made me realize that if people weren’t going to invite us to their party that we’d create our own, which is exactly what we did.”

From there, Yonder integrated their high-strung and energetic live show even more than the jam band circuit, piecing together the foundations of what would soon become the jamgrass scene in the process. That momentum reached a fever pitch for the band in the late 2000s when the band was headlining bigger rooms than it ever had before and landing opening slots on arena tours with the Dave Matthews Band and Widespread Panic, similar to the gigs New Grass Revival had opening similar venues for Leon Russell in 1979.

Thinking back on that era of the band, Kaufmann says it made him understand the full potential of what jamgrass and bluegrass could achieve if given the opportunity, which he says is now being realized with artists like Billy Strings, Mountain Grass Unit, and others.

“Even in the late aughts when Yonder was at max room capacity and opening these arena shows, we wondered if bluegrass would ever work in rooms this big. And, to our amusement, it did – you just needed to fill the venue with the right people. We didn’t know if that would be us headlining those places one day, but playing those gigs showed us it was something that could happen.

“With that in mind, it’s no surprise to see a young gun like Billy Strings come along and set the world on fire. In the little amount of time we’ve spent together it was obvious that he is a special talent, so observing his rise and all he’s done for this kind of music has been mind-blowing.”

Yonder’s success lit a spark for the jamgrass movement that’s been burning ever since, with countless performers crediting the band for the influence they’ve bestowed upon them. One of those people is Kyle Tuttle, who grew up following the band around on tour in the early 2000s before eventually landing a spot playing in founding member Jeff Austin’s band after Austin departed Yonder in 2014.

“I was just starting to see real bluegrass and already loved the Grateful Dead, so when Yonder Mountain String Band came along and overlapped with those two worlds, it was like a dream come true,” Tuttle explains. “I’d been seeing all these suit-and-tie bands playing straight bluegrass and loved it, but at the same time I was also wondering where I fit into it. Then Yonder pops up and it feels like what I’d been waiting my whole life to discover.”

Tuttle played his first gig with the Jeff Austin Band in 2016 and remained in the group up until the singer’s untimely death in 2019. He went on to perform with the GRAMMY Award-winning Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway from 2021 to early 2025. Now he leads his own collective, the Kyle Tuttle Band, where he intertwines original compositions with traditional bluegrass covers and other off-the-wall influences as he puts his own spin on what jamgrass is.

“It’s a common perspective for people to not want you to mess with their bluegrass and tradition, whereas the jamgrass world tends to be more wide open,” admits Tuttle. “Fans nowadays are ready to hear whatever interesting mashup you create, which makes for a really nice union.”

With how wide open the jamgrass has become, even bands outside its periphery have found their way into the community from time to time. Take Fruition for example, a band that began busking on the streets of Portland over 15 years ago with a mix of string instruments and a poppy folk sound that sits on the far outer reaches of the jamgrass spectrum. Similar to how Yonder struggled to be embraced by the bluegrass community in its early days, Fruition’s Kellen Asebroek said it was the jamgrass community that first embraced and welcomed the band when nobody else would. “There’s no telling where we’d be if they hadn’t welcomed us into their family.”

“I was introduced to [jamgrass] in 2002 before I even knew what it was,” recollects Asebroek. “My uncle was a big Leftover Salmon fan and gave me an audience recording from the ’90s to listen to that left me in awe wondering what the hell it was they were doing. I grew up in more of a punk, reggae and classic rock world, so that was the first time I heard something remotely grassy. It wasn’t until we started Fruition and were busking on the street that people began referring to us as a jamgrass band. That being said, Fruition tends to be on the more structured side, so much so that I wouldn’t even call ourselves a jam band. We’ve always been in a unique place in that world in the sense that the jamgrass community is who took us in as babies and showed us around even though we were on the fringes of it.”

Also on the fringes of jamgrass is Daniel Donato, who began picking country and bluegrass tunes on Nashville’s Broadway strip as a teenager before launching his own project, Cosmic Country, in 2015 after seeing shapeshifting country singer Sturgill Simpson at the Ryman. The sound that grew out of that moment is equal parts Simpson and the Dead, but Donato says that bluegrass legends like Bill Monroe are also critical to what he creates as well, even though he utilizes mostly electric instrumentation.

“Jerry Garcia also had a really sophisticated understanding and appreciation for bluegrass music,” compares Donato. “The arrangements of the Dead were not succinctly bluegrass, but there was a ton of bluegrass influence that went into the way he played, especially with Old & In The Way and the Jerry Garcia Band. My goal has been to tap into a similar feeling, but with a slightly more prominent country twang.”

Someone else who’s spent plenty of time in the jamgrass scene despite not always producing music that would be categorized as such is Sierra Hull. The mandolin prodigy grew up on a heavy dose of traditional bluegrass in East Tennessee, with acts like Blue Highway, the Seldom Scene, and Lonesome River Band being the soundtrack of her youth. While she’s tended to lean more towards “chambergrass” and singer-songwriter styles in her adult life, she also takes plenty of time to let loose and jam, whether it’s stretching out her own material or joining artists like Cory Wong, the String Cheese Incident, Greensky Bluegrass, Béla Fleck, and Sam Bush on stage. The latter of whom she credits – along with luminaries like Peter Rowan and David Grisman – for planting the seeds that later grew to become jamgrass.

“For people like me, [Sam] was such a huge gateway to a lot of these other musicians who were really open-minded about what they played and who they collaborated with,” confides Hull. “Coming from a more traditional background, what I’ve enjoyed most about getting out to these bluegrass and jam festivals [is] mixing it up with folks. I’ve become a fan of jamgrass from seeing it all happen up close, rather than having grown up on albums – which I feel is the case for a lot of fans of jam music. The recorded music is still awesome, but the live shows are where the spirit and energy of jamgrass truly live.”

Hull continued, stressing how despite the current momentum behind jamgrass it’s still a very niche genre that nobody gets into expecting to become famous from it, which makes the heights Billy Strings and others are taking it to that much more mesmerizing.

“There’s something really cool about seeing folks who maybe don’t know who Bill Monroe or Doc Watson is, but they can go to a Billy show and immediately connect to the authenticity of what the music is,” exclaims Hull. “We live in a day and age where people are ripping on their pedals and doing more progressive stuff than they ever have before with string music, but at the same time most all of these bands have their moments where they throw that all away and just play a straight-up bluegrass tune. Seeing people resonate with that is central to what this music is and does.”

Another woman staking out a career in and around jamgrass is Lindsay Lou, who first discovered the subgenre witnessing the early days of Greensky Bluegrass performing in Michigan. Although she’d already been vaguely familiar with Yonder and Leftover Salmon, Lou credits Greensky’s sound and proximity to her as the driving factors for introducing her not just their music, but jamgrass as a whole.

“Greensky was my gateway to the jam world, because we were both part of the same scene,” says Lou. “I started hanging with them and soon found myself at festivals with other like-minded bands that sent me diving into the music of the Grateful Dead and others.”

One of those artists she wound up connecting with was a young Billy Strings, who she’d grow close with and later live across the street from in Nashville. The two would even go on to co-write a number of songs together including “Freedom” and “Nothing’s Working,” which both appeared on Strings’ albums Home and Renewal, as well as the latter appearing on Lou’s Queen Of Time. “It’s been really cool having written songs with Billy and hearing him perform them to arenas packed with 30,000 all singing along.”

“It’s no surprise to me that Billy has brought so many people to jam and bluegrass music in the same way that Yonder and Greensky did for so many before him, including Billy himself,” she stresses. “It’s been so much fun watching a young hippie kid like him take a traditional song to places you never thought it could go due to him embracing the musical conversation that jam music is centered around.”

Someone at the heart of the Billy Strings phenomenon is Jarrod Walker, who’s played mandolin in the Michigander’s band since 2018. Similar to Sam Bush, Walker believes the roots of jamgrass can be traced all the way back to Bill Monroe, due to how he took popular songs of the day and breathed new life into them with stringed arrangements – similar to how modern day jam bands pull from influences far and wide to create something entirely new. And although he credits Sam Bush as being a central figure for the movement, he also holds the Seldom Scene – who recorded an extended version of the Grateful Dead’s “I Know You Rider” (simply called “Rider”) on its 1973 album Act III – in a similarly high regard.

“There have been a smorgasbord of different influences in jamgrass from the very beginning with Irish and English music and gospel and blues – all of it was an integral part of what Bill Monroe originally did,” says Walker. “Then someone like Jerry Garcia comes along and follows Monroe like people would soon be following the Dead, which led to Old & In The Way, continuing the prophecy that’s still playing out to this day.”

But even as that prophecy continues to play out, Walker is amazed by where it’s taken not just the Billy Strings band, but string music as a whole. Having been accustomed to gigging at performance art centers and other smaller, seated venues for most of his pre-Billy picking days, he says that the experience of performing at rock clubs and now arenas with fans going crazy for bluegrass music has been mind-boggling and a phenomenon he’ll never stop being captivated by.

“[Playing arenas] is something none of us saw coming and is a combination of being at the right place at the right time and the contributions of everyone who came before us that paved this path for us to do it,” states Walker. “Billy is also a fantastic musician and student of bluegrass whose love for the music combined with his other influences is emblematic of the cohesion that is core to jamgrass and everything it stands for.”

Like all forms of music, jamgrass is a living, breathing organism that is constantly evolving and bringing new ideas and influences to the table. Whether it’s traditional and progressive bluegrass or rock, blues, punk, soul, country and everything in between, it all has a place in the jamgrass setting and is without a doubt the biggest driving factor of the genre’s success. It truly is a “rising tide lifts all boats” scenario that may have been a long time coming to arrive, but now that it’s here and thriving shows no signs of departing anytime soon.

“It took a long time for listening tastes to catch up with this kind of music and these instruments, but it’s no surprise to me that someone as talented as Billy is having the success he’s having,” declares Bush. “It’s only natural that the music is going to grow, and it’s in a really healthy place right now. But even with the rise of jamgrass you still have good ole Del McCoury leading the pack with his Bill Monroe style of bluegrass, and the same audience that loves jamgrass loves him too.”

Continue exploring our Jamgrass in July coverage here. This content brought to you in partnership with Preston Thompson Guitars.

Photo Credit: Sam Bush courtesy of Crossover Touring; Sierra Hull courtesy of the artist; Ben Kauffman courtesy of Crossover Touring.

Jamgrass in July

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In bluegrass and string band music in 2026, one thing is clear: jamgrass is the center of gravity.

Once a decade or so, give or take – this is bluegrass, not arithmetic – our cozy little niche genre and its neighbors enjoy a renaissance. Many experienced the O Brother, Where Art Thou? bump that bluegrass enjoyed after the hit film (and its beloved soundtrack) was released in 2000. Before that, the best-selling bluegrass album of all time was Old & In the Way, a self-titled debut album released in 1975 by Peter Rowan, Jerry Garcia, Vassar Clements, David Grisman, and John Kahn. That was another prominent spike on the bluegrass-popularity-line-graph.

Alison Krauss & Union Station brought hundreds of thousands of new listeners into these genres in the ’90s and ’00s – as they continue to do, to this day. Many count AKUS as another such inflection point for bluegrass. As well as the (capital F, capital R) Folk Revival, Flatt & Scruggs appearing on The Beverly Hillbillies, and even the earliest days of the genre when Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys were superstars, electrifying audiences on the Grand Ole Opry, over the airwaves, and across the country. Since the genre’s earliest days, bluegrass enjoys these periodic notoriety tidal waves in mainstream, popular culture driven by its charm, virtuosity, and “wholesome” perception.

In the 2010s and 2020s, the most striking inflection point for bluegrass is certainly jamgrass. While the genre’s popularity in the new millennium has been demonstrably multivalent – in the social media age, the music’s fanbase has grown by leaps and bounds no matter the genre or subgenre – jamgrass still stands out as the primary popularity driver in the space. And even more so as an economic driver. As vertical video advances across the internet as the most commonly ingested content format, jamgrass is proliferating right along with it, young folks and acolytes connecting, combusting, and fueling the jamgrass charge.

Billy Strings is surely the zenith of the form at this point in time, as we all know, but – as he himself readily will admit – he stands on mighty shoulders, the roots of jamgrass reaching far, far back. By some measures, its seeds were planted in the Big Mon’s time, too, but it really only began to coalesce as a slang term, subgenre, and an informal set of style points and signifiers from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s. In the early days of bluegrass, decades prior, many acts we see as legends and forebears – and many inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame – were just as likely to call their music “country” or “hillbilly” or other terms as they were to use “bluegrass.” Similarly, in jamgrass, the earliest acts to pioneer these sounds often didn’t use the term at all, or still to this day aren’t routinely categorized as jamgrass. But wherever bluegrass jams were brewing – especially at bluegrass and music festivals, where lineups were often eclectic and creative cross pollination was common – jamgrass was being grown.

Who was the first jamgrass band? Was it the Earl Scruggs Revue, when Earl and his sons grew out their hair, played anti-war songs, and toured colleges? Was it the Country Gentlemen or the Seldom Scene? Was it New Grass Revival – a choice candidate, yes, but their music could indicate they are a generation (or two or three) further evolved than jamgrass’s missing link would be. We have many fine specimens in this historical record, but who is the common ancestor of the form? John Hartford? Mmm… not quite. Or perhaps it wasn’t the Revue, but Flatt & Scruggs themselves, when their material began to shift towards the end, and Lester started eyeing the door…? Or was it the Grateful Dead? Well, it certainly wouldn’t exist as a genre or subgenre without them, but were they the first to do the thing? No.

David Grisman, Tony Rice, Clarence White, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, Tony Trischka, and so many other pickers who learned at the feet of the first generation – literally and figuratively; or on stage beside them – would go on to become gems in the crown of jamgrass and foundational figures. But none perfectly fit underneath the moniker’s umbrella. (That’s certainly a beauty of the format, it almost always requires one foot in bluegrass, old-time, and string band and the other foot as far afield as hips will allow.) Very few of these examples would use the term, ever, across their careers.

As the generations further unrolled, into the future, Tim O’Brien, Leftover Salmon, the String Cheese Incident, Railroad Earth, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Sam Bush Band, and more gave rise to Greensky Bluegrass, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Infamous Stringdusters, Trampled by Turtles, Hot Buttered Rum, Fruition – and suddenly there wasn’t just a critical mass of acts making Bonnaroo-ready bluegrass, it was becoming a tradition unto itself. As these things happen, jamgrass has snowballed, its exponential growth bringing us to 2026 and a veritable golden age of the form. But it’s still just getting started.

Billy Strings may be the one filling arenas, but wherever you take a sample of bluegrass across the States, around the world, at festivals or venues, or on TikTok or reels, jamgrass is going to be there. Mountain Grass Unit are quickly on the rise, and Bronwyn’s live shows are excellent, charming, infinitely ingestible jamgrass. Molly Tuttle brings psychedelia and the Grateful Dead with her into her new pop-inflected era, Sierra Hull jams out with Cory Wong on tour, and Tatiana Hargreaves guests with the Dave Matthews Band – who, it turns out, were themselves a jamgrass band the entire time. AJ Lee & Blue Summit aren’t quite a jamgrass band, except they totally are – especially in the way they infuse California and the Bay Area into everything they do, drawing a direct line from Garcia, Grisman, Rowan, et. al. to their own songs and sounds today. Like Sam Grisman Project, too, who interconnect jamgrass generations and all the many circles of its Venn diagram.

Magoo, Clay Street Unit, Fireside Collective, Kitchen Dwellers, Shadowgrass, and countless others have never known pre-jamgrass identities as bands. They’ve always been jamgrass bands. It’s fascinating. We may forget this fact in the face of its obviousness, but we’re watching the conception of a new genre of music happen in real time.

It’s truly a golden age of jamgrass and there’s oh-so-much-more to explore. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.

All month long, we’re celebrating Jamgrass in July on BGS! Check out our Essential Jamgrass Playlist below – and please let us know who we forgot and what songs we missed! – dive into our collection of 30 Jamgrass Sitch Sessions, read about the origins and evolution of jamgrass, check out our chronology of jamgrass, and stay tuned for everything else jamgrass all month long, right here on BGS and across social media.

Photo Credit: Sam Bush by Shelly Swanger Photography; Bronwyn by Alexa Stone; Billy Strings by Dana Trippe.

Darren Nicholson Wants His Style of Bluegrass to Sound Different

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Over the past twenty-some years, Darren Nicholson has played mandolin all over the world – whether with Alecia Nugent, as a member of Balsam Range (a group he co-founded), or on his own (with or without a band). No matter where he traveled, you can be sure that Nicholson was bringing Western North Carolina with him. Nicholson was born, raised, and still lives in the area.

When BGS caught up with Nicholson, he was home in Canton, N.C., a town about 20 miles west of Asheville. It’s a region that he feels has been a bit overlooked in music history. “The oldest folk festival in the country [Mountain Dance and Folk Festival] is held in Asheville,” he shares. “There were recordings that happened in Asheville before the Bristol Sessions.”

The area he pointed out, despite its remoteness, also has been home to many significant musicians – as well as developing a dance-friendly style of bluegrass that drew from many different styles.

Nicholson’s love for the area has led to a rather unique sponsorship for his tour van and trailer. Through a friend he met with representatives of the Avalon Mountain Community, a private mountaintop neighborhood and development in the hills of Western Carolina. Nicholson calls it a “win-win” situation as he receives some financial support for touring expenses while Avalon now has a “rolling billboard.” “I even wrote a jingle for them,” he states.

Nicholson will be traveling around this year touring a fine new album, Lonesome Trails and Tall Tales. He counts it as either his fourth or sixth solo effort, depending on whether you factor in two EPs. Lonesome Trails and Tall Tales arrives after several particularly eventful years for Nicholson, including leaving his longtime band Balsam Range, getting sober, and acquiring a prized 1923 Lloyd Loar mandolin – all among the topics that he was more than willing to talk about with BGS.

How does your new album Lonesome Trails and Tall Tales tie in with your earlier albums?

Darren Nicholson: My records have a sound, you know. I’ve always been pretty much consistent – besides an electric country EP – doing the music that I consider my style of bluegrass or the bluegrass that I grew up on, which is to me the traditional bluegrass of the ’60s. Having a producer like Carl Jackson in the early days influenced how I made records, because Carl had played with Jim & Jesse and he came out of [when] an entire bluegrass movement had almost a country kind of feel to it. I love the sound of those records. And it was partly because I grew up in Western North Carolina and there’s a huge dance element here – the square dance music.

The old-timey driving style of rhythm with that light percussion – like Jimmy Martin, Flatt & Scruggs, the Osbornes – that really fits in with people who danced. And the modern kind of bluegrass – like the Alison Krauss style of bluegrass, which is amazing – does not lend itself to dancing. The modern style of bluegrass that was really kind of heavy on the one and three beat, and then the older style of bluegrass, which was very much more even, rhythmically.

And how does the new album differ from your prior ones?

What separated this particular recording from the others is just my growth as a songwriter… I was picking what I thought were the best songs I had or songs that were different from each other. A lot of times… [with] the way things are being mass produced now, if Nashville finds one song that’s a hit, they’ll write 10 more just like it for all the other artists. So they all start sounding the same.

To me, all the great artists of yesteryear, all their material was different. Their sound was different. Instead of just finding something you could mass produce, make a buck on, and then hop on to the next thing, they were actually creating art and trying to artistically be different. That was what was good about it.

So [in] the same way, I try to pick songs in my set. I don’t want to play five songs in a row that sound the same. Otherwise, it’s boring – I see bands do it all the time. They kick off in [the key of] B and they play five songs that could basically be the same song, you know? I understand why people who are non-bluegrass fans will go, “You know, all bluegrass sounds the same.”

I tried to pick six songs that were completely opposite from each other, so when you go down track by track, it’s a different journey and it doesn’t bore the listener. Every song is a different tempo, it’s a different groove, it’s a different key, it’s a different vibe, and so that’s how I put records together.

Were these songs ones that you’ve accumulated over the last couple years or are they all a recent crop of songs?

A few of them were really old and a few of them were really new. “Big Sky” has been around for a few years and I wrote it with Charles Humphrey. I thought it was “okay,” and this shows you how off-base I can be sometimes.

I’m driving to a gig one day with my buddy Kevin [Sluder]. He plays bass with us. It was a solo gig, but he was just riding with me. We’re listening to songs and Kevin goes, “That song is amazing. You’re an idiot if you don’t cut that song.” I was like, “That song? It’s okay.” He goes, “No, that song’s more than okay. That song is special. You need to cut that.” I took this batch of songs to Jeff Collins, who produced the record, and that was one of the first ones he picked. And sure enough, radio played it. Banjo Radio wore that song out. If it were up to me, I would have probably left that one on the pile of demos.

One of the newer ones was “Eager Overachiever.” I’d just written that song with Andrew Blythe. It was so fun. Every time I would sing it for somebody, they loved it. It’s a funny song about addiction.

It made me laugh, and the song also shows a lot of personality.

That’s the point, you know. That song has personality. One of my favorite artists [growing up] was Roger Miller and he would sometimes do these spoken pieces. Especially in country music, sometimes there would be recitations or things would set up songs. It was interesting and just funny, you know.

Can you talk a little about the music traditions of Western North Carolina where you grew up?

There’s a definite style. If you go across the country, there’s little pockets of bluegrass that have their own sound, for sure. But Western North Carolina and this region was so rural and cut off… If it’s 120 years ago and you’re in the mountains of Western North Carolina, people would walk for 10 miles to get to a barn dance or some place on Saturday night. And the band would be whoever showed up. It might be a banjo and guitar. It might be fiddle and banjo. But it changed the way you played. When Doc Watson plays his leads, he also plays his rhythm; he’s playing lead and rhythm at the same time. Where modern players who have a whole band behind them, they’re like playing rhythm and then when it comes time to take their solo, it’s a whole different mindset.

As [the area] grew and people got together more and more, they still played the same way. They passed it down from generation to generation, that strong sense of rhythm and timing that is a trademark for Western North Carolina. Look at Marc Pruitt and Steve Sutton; you know, Jason Burleson is from Western North Carolina. Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Mark Kuykendall, Tom McKinney, Mike Hunter – all of these amazing players are from Western North Carolina. Randy Davis – Bill Monroe introduced him every night for five years: “He’s the man from Asheville, North Carolina; he’s the man with perfect timing.”

At these musical gatherings in Western North Carolina, you’re describing how people frequently would bring whatever instruments they had – acoustic or electric. And it wasn’t doctrinaire about what a bluegrass instrument had to be.

Yeah, it was community. And I’m going to say this, and I don’t care to say this because I’m from here and I’m from generations and generations of people who play this music. It’s always somebody who got into bluegrass in college or they got into it older, and they’re not even from this area. It’s somebody that’s from New York or from California or from Oregon. They write articles, and they become self-proclaimed experts of bluegrass. And they say, “Well, this is bluegrass and this isn’t bluegrass.”

They didn’t come from generations of this music. They don’t know. They’re not at the epicenter of where it came from and how it started, but they’re always the ones who try to dictate. And then most of the time, they don’t even play. But that’s their way of being involved in the music somehow. It really hurts the music because any time you start segregating something, you’re just keeping somebody [out]. That’s not how this music started.

Do you think Earl Scruggs said, “I’m not going to play if there’s an electric bass here”? You know what I mean? Look at the people who created the music: Earl Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers – they had electric bass. They had drums. But there’s somebody, who’s basically a yuppie, who is trying to tell us what the music is. I do take offense to that.

That’s why the Gibson Brothers have that song called “They Called It Music.” That’s great. I love that because that’s what it was. It’s like, they just called it music. We got together and made music and everybody was welcome. And it sounded like bluegrass. It sounded like country. It sounded like old-time. And it’s just sad. It’s like bluegrass has almost tried to put too fine a point on itself. And it’s almost made itself smaller because of that.

To me, sometimes it feels like the more I write or listen to music, the less I know, in a sense – or, the more I learn, to say it another way.

That’s how we all should be. We should remain a green tomato. If we’re red, we’re done, right?

If I moved out to Seattle – I really enjoy grunge. And if after five years, I read about grunge as much as I could, all of a sudden I know more than the people who created it? But I see that happen [with bluegrass], you know. It’s almost like someone is such a fan or likes this so much that they take ownership to a point where they’re hurting it. It’s like a pet. They’re holding it and petting it so much that they’re actually hurting it.

Bluegrass can look like a lot of different things and so there’s different styles depending on the regions, too.

I was wondering who are the main musicians that have influenced your mandolin playing?

Basically, there are four guys who are on my Mount Rushmore of mandolin. Country music or bluegrass or whatever in roots music – and that’s Bill Monroe, Jesse McReynolds, Bobby Osborne, and Jethro Burns.

Every modern style has come out of those four guys or a combination of those guys. That’s where David Grisman, Ricky Skaggs, Doyle Lawson, Sam Bush, [were all] influenced by those. So, there are some songs that I try to sound like Bill Monroe and there’s some songs I cross-pick like Jesse. Then there’re some songs I play more fiddle-note stuff like Bobby and then there’re some songs that get a little swingy and jazzy and I’m channeling my Jethro, you know?

Those guys kind of set the landscape. My big influence, as far as players that I got to see and got close to, is Mike Hunter in Western North Carolina. He was a huge, huge influence. He was an incredible mandolinist.

You have said you tend to let the song guide you and not to impose a style on it. Did this approach come from someone’s advice or was it something you learned along the way?

I had a mentor named Steve Sutton. I started playing with Alecia Nugent in 2004 and Steve was the bandleader. He got me that job. During that time, musicians would come through in little waves, like in five-year clusters. A lot of my peers were Aaron Ramsey, Ashby Frank, Andy Ball, Jesse Cobb, and so there were a bunch of guys during that time. Not all of them are Adam Steffey clones, but a lot of my peers were influenced heavily by Adam Steffey.

It’s like, who can play like Adam Steffey? You can get close, but you’re not going to beat the guy. So, my mentor told me, “All of these other people are in that vein. You would be way ahead to do your own thing and just sound like yourself. You won’t mess up as much either, because instead of thinking about what somebody else did, you’re actually thinking about what you’re doing. So, your brain is actually in the moment with your hands.… Try to play what fits the song and instead of trying to settle into a style – just play what the song or the band needs.”

And, you know, I just never turned back from that. He really helped me with that. Then, all of the sudden, too, if you sound like yourself and everybody else is going after this other thing, then you’re a peacock in a room full of chickens.

A couple years back, you acquired a rare 1923 Lloyd Loar mandolin. How are you enjoying it?

Oh, it sounds incredible. It’s a hundred-year-old wood. You can’t replicate that. Ferdinand [named after the mandolin’s original owner] hadn’t really been played until I got it, but I’ve played it quite a bit. You can play that thing for just a few minutes and it’s just singing. It’s just unreal.

It gets better and better every minute that you play it. It’s balanced. It’s loud, but it’s also got these real pretty, sweet tones in it. It’s just a pretty magical instrument. It’s a life-changing instrument, for sure. It’s a rare bird amongst rare birds.

Early in the pandemic you got sober, which you’ve been quite open about. How has this changed your life?

Getting sober, I had all this time on my hands and I started getting productive. I started recording, writing songs, and all of a sudden, after all these years, I felt my creativity. I started throwing all my time into healthy things… I had my life back. I had my time. I had my energy. I had my mind, my spirit – all that came back because of sobriety.

So, I talk about it because I think talking about it is a great way to maybe touch someone who’s maybe struggling with it out there, you know? Give them a little shot in the arm and say, “You know what? If that poor bastard can do it, I can do it too.”

That was around the time you left Balsam Range too?

When I left that band, people were like, “Why would you leave a high-profile band?” And it’s like, there’s more growth over here [going solo]. The last year I was with them, we went on about 20 dates and I did about 160 dates on my own. I wasn’t stagnant anymore. A band has been together for a long time, people request the same songs and you’re playing the same songs all the time.

The pandemic also resulted in you having something of a revelation about performing music, right?

I found myself doing house concerts for 20 people, and they’re people who saw me on huge stages with Balsam Range. They would cry because they’d never experienced bluegrass like this. I’m like, “Well, this was how it was intended.” This was how it was created in these houses a hundred years ago in the mountains of Western North Carolina — community people entertaining each other.

So, there’s that. Then there’s sobriety. And then there’s like, “Wait a minute, am I doing this for my ego to get famous or am I doing this to be healthy and be part of a community?” It all goes together. Like, I talk about my sobriety to help others. I want to use my music to impact others.

If we do it with a good heart and the right intentions, all that other stuff will fall into place. We want to play anywhere. We’ll go and we’re ready. We’re road ready. We’ve got original music; we can do covers; square dances… I want to be the Bob Wills of Bluegrass.

Photo courtesy of the artist.