Guitarist-singer-songwriter Molly Tuttle caused bit of seismic activity in the roots music world when in the middle of May she announced a brand new band and the beginning of a brand new era, after the smashing, GRAMMY-winning run of her decidedly bluegrass outfit, Golden Highway. With several years of touring and two critically acclaimed and audience-adored albums with that group under her belt, Tuttle posted on social media that she had assembled Mary Meyer (fiddle, mandolin, keys), Vanessa McGowan (bass), Megan Jane (drums, percussion) and Ellen Angelico (guitars, Dobro) for her new backing band. Predictably, the award-amassing picker had many a bluegrass “chair snapper” run to her comment sections to decry her abandonment of bluegrass, her selling out, and her forsaking the genre that made her.
A little over a month later, Tuttle announced her upcoming album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, due out August 15 via Nonesuch Records. With that second wave of exciting news she dropped the LP’s first single, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark.” Last week, she and her newly-minted band appeared on CBS Saturday Morning to perform that track (watch above) as well as a burnin’ fan favorite from the Golden Highway years, “San Joaquin” (watch below). In addition, Tuttle spoke to journalist Anthony Mason about the project, her creative process, and how and why she’s ready for something fresh and different – sonically, and otherwise. (Watch Tuttle’s interview with Mason below, as well.)
“Okay, yeah, I want to set the record straight!” Tuttle laughs when asked about “abandoning bluegrass” and her more string-band-inclined fans. “I’m not abandoning the bluegrass fans. I feel like, with my music, a door will just open and then I’m walking through it.”
“With my last two records,” she continues, “I just felt so inspired to go back to my roots and write bluegrass songs. And, all of a sudden in the last year, I was like, ‘It’s time to do something different, to do something totally new, and find my own sound that’s not emulating a certain genre or style.'”
Longtime fans of Tuttle know that dabbling in genres on the fringes of more traditional bluegrass has always been a practice at the core of her creativity, songwriting, and expression. Her debut EP after moving to Nashville, 2017’s Rise, was far from straight ahead bluegrass in structure, arrangements, and production. In 2019 she released When You’re Ready. Her full-length debut, it boasted bluegrass and flatpicking bones with dashes of old-time and country, but couldn’t be easily or simply defined – or entirely contained – underneath any of those aesthetic umbrellas. “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark” is poppy, bold, and broad with dashes of Katie Gavin (of MUNA), Sheryl Crow, and Aimee Mann. But still, it’s anchored by, of all things, clawhammer guitar. Is that “abandoning” the genres that made her?
Along the way, Tuttle’s live shows have always been expansive, joyous, and fun, whatever the personnel on stage – and her shows have always been unconcerned with genre fidelity, too. (Even as she crisscrossed the country and the globe with her beloved ‘grassy Golden Highway comrades.) Now, with her new “that ain’t bluegrass” band, she continues playing with genre and expectations.
For instance, at ROMP in Owensboro, Kentucky, last month she at one point invited Del, Ronnie, and Rob McCoury onstage for a guest slot, many a Golden Highway track made the set list, and she covered both “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and a dramatic, languid version of Icona Pop and Charli XCX’s smash hyperpop hit “I Love It” for her twin encores. This sort of musical multiplicity from Tuttle isn’t anything new, it’s foundational. It’s a keystone on which she’s built her entire brand. Her incredible covers album, 2020’s pandemic-proffered …but i’d rather be with you is another excellent example of this fact.
It’s clear Tuttle, her band, and her team are knee-deep in messaging and intentionally reinforcing their brand identity for this next album and her headlining “The Highway Knows” tour, which kicks off in September. Whether on CBS Saturday Morning, social media, or a bluegrass festival stage, that task comes incredibly naturally to Tuttle, because these sounds aren’t a gimmick. This isn’t a cash grab or selling out or abandoning anything or anyone. It’s Molly Tuttle being exactly who she has always been. After all, just when you think you know her, “She’ll Change.”
From their earliest days as a duo, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings have crafted utterly timeless old-time, bluegrass, and American roots music of the highest order. Their lyrics and melodies sound as though they could have been plucked from any/every golden era of folk music on this continent, while at the same time being effortlessly forward-looking and grounded in the present. Perhaps that timelessness is why it feels so surprising that Welch & Rawlings have entered their own new era, as sceptered elders in their chosen genres and communities. The surprise being, of course, the realization that… have they not always been roots music elders?!
Last week, NPR Music unveiled a brand new Tiny Desk Concert by Welch & Rawlings, 15 years since their last appearance at the internet’s biggest smallest stage. In the roughly 20-minute performance, the pickers, singers, songwriters, and life partners perform three songs from their most recent album, 2024’s Woodland, as well as revisiting one of their all-time classics, “Revelator” – from 2001’s Time (The Revelator). Viewing 2025’s Tiny Desk Concert alongside their 2010 performance (watch both sets below), the circuitous journey they’ve taken to sage old-time veterans is obvious, apparent. But it’s still no less mystifying that two artists and creators so adept at musical time traveling have landed in this new phase of their careers right under our noses. With silver hair, wizened voices, a lifetime’s supply of grit, and a tenderness that’s begun to eclipse their fiery, razor’s edge aggression, Welch & Rawlings continue to be their generation’s epitome of modern folk troubadour-ship.
And aren’t they suited for it! “Empty Trainload of Sky,” a song inspired by their titular recording studio Woodland’s propensity for landing in the middle of catastrophic tornado tracks, hits just as hard in this context, their Tiny Desk performance released mere days before tragic and fatal natural disasters and flooding hit multiple states across the U.S. Their songs constantly bend time like this, finding resonance in specificity and universality, both. “Lawman” and “Hashtag” sound like numbers that could’ve been sourced from wax cylinder recordings – or from 9:16 short form videos ripe for virality and topically delicious. “Revelator,” then, reminds that Welch & Rawlings know that they operate from within and outside of the constructs of time, at least as far as music goes. They are perfectly at home in this wormholed medium.
Fifteen years feels like a mere instant, a split-second, in the grand scheme – and, certainly, when you consider the ubiquity and staying power of Welch & Rawling’s body of work over the decades of their career. Still, you can see and hear the age, the miles traveled, the hardships overcome, and the joys celebrated on their faces, in their voices, and in the pluck of their strings. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, with each and every note they utter, invite each of us to step outside of time. It’s no wonder that they’re thriving, at the highest of heights they’ve reached yet, as they enter their latest golden age, as roots music heroes and elders who’ve touched countless scores of us with their art.
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings continue on tour now through the fall. More info here.
It’s a warm, summery day in early April when I sit down with archivist, writer, and guitarist Cameron Knowler on the shores of Old Hickory Lake in Middle Tennessee. Both Knowler and myself happen to now live in Old Hickory, a small village in Davidson County that was formerly a DuPont company town and is nestled on the edges of the eponymous, manmade US Army Corps of Engineers lake on the Cumberland River.
The setting is a far cry – geographically, topographically, and ecologically – from Knowler’s hometown of Yuma, Arizona, a place that serves as the inspiration, background, and foreground of his stunning new solo guitar album, CRK (released April 4 by Worried Songs). Knowler’s upbringing in Yuma was traumatic and bleak, not exactly a storybook experience by any measure. Still, like many roots musicians and creatives, the landscapes and dioramas of the wild west California/Arizona border town have become the guitarist-composer’s primary muse.
CRK sounds like the desert. Like hot, searing parking lots. Like mesquite and cactuses and roadrunners and mesas and red rocks. Stark flatpicked and finger-plucked melodies give equal consideration and immortalization to sweeping natural landscapes and small, depressingly human settings, too. Unlike so many of his subjects and inspirations in and around Yuma, this collection of compositions never moves to pave over the intricacies, nuances, and subversions Knowler finds in revisiting his hometown in music and memories. Still, the album is as gorgeous and transportive as any of our favorite famous paintings of the Old West, or soundtracks to iconic western films, or depictions of ancient pueblos. Perhaps his subject is a strip mall or a vignette of the proverbial “suburban hell,” but in this context each feels like an entire universe unto itself, a dreamscape – a home.
CRK opens with a gorgeous prose poem set to music, a track titled “Christmas in Yuma.” Immediately, the record is thereby attached through terroir and tradition to other western artists like Steinbeck and McCarthy. The album’s package is ornamented with gorgeous photographs, polaroids, bits of imagery, printed art, and poetry, further evoking artists we associate with the Southwest like Dorothea Lange and Linda Hogan. But the stories herein are told almost exclusively by guitar – usually Knowler solo as centerpiece, but sometimes joined by ensembles including guitarists Jordan Tice (who co-produced the project) and Rich Hinman, as well as other instrumentalists like Rayna Gellert, Robert Bowlin, Jay Bellerose, and more. The guitar is an instrument so pervasive and ubiquitous we often forget how aptly it can showcase these kinds of narratives, and how at home the six-string always feels in the West.
But with CRK, listeners won’t ever forget those facts. This is a narrative album. Is it also a technical achievement, intricate and intriguing and complex? Absolutely. But making an impressive guitar album was clearly not Knowler’s goal. Telling stories, with his medium being the guitar and the traditions that encircle it, was his chief aim. To say the project is successful in this regard would be an embarrassingly trite understatement.
And so, while watching the springtime water birds and snacking on lunch – with Knowler’s neck, wrists, and fingers dripping in Native-smithed silver and turquoise – we two sat down on the banks of a long, twisting lake on the Cumberland River in Nashville to discuss the guitar, the desert, and the little town on the banks of the Colorado River called Yuma – that Cameron Knowler once, and still, calls home.
I wanted to start by talking about place. I’m obsessed with how music has been slowly but surely divorced from its relationship to place over time. Your album, what jumped out at me immediately was it has such a strong relationship to place. How do you take something physical, tangible, geographical – a place like Yuma or Old Hickory Lake – and translate that into your medium? How do you think about evoking landscape or evoking an image with music?
Cameron Knowler: That’s a great question. I have like 10 ways of responding to that. As you said, music is getting divorced from place and I think it’s something of a cliche at this point that we’re losing regionalism. In the sense that, even with bow strokes– fiddlers in Galax, Virginia are different than fiddlers in northern Virginia. Not consciously, necessarily, but just as a colloquialism. As a part of their place. I didn’t [have] an old man or an old woman playing a fiddle who taught me tunes, I never had any of that [regionalism]. Instead, the “white kid from the suburbs” phenomenon happened. When I moved to Texas, I got connected with a regional fiddler in Terlingua, Texas – kind of [where the movie], Paris, Texas started. I learned his repertoire, which was interesting in that he learned a lot from Brad Leftwich when they were young and living in Santa Barbara. That was the void that I was missing. Not even musically, just in my life. I lost my mom, I lost my dad, I didn’t have family, so to me that was a cue, like a clue.
Then it flips, because there is a robust fiddle tradition of the Tohono O’odham [Nation] right there on the Yuma, Arizona/California border. But that’s not my culture. I could have gone in and said, “I’m gonna learn this tune” – or melody or whatever. Then that [could be] my way into the landscape. Instead of coming at it from an internal perspective, it was an external perspective, basically like a western painter. Like an oil painter painting Tucson or Walpi.
To answer your question, it’s slippery, ’cause you can’t go on stage and say, “Okay, this instrumental song is about a grocery store that I grew up driving by.” [Laughs] I can’t say that. It does come from that place, but I don’t say that. For me, the visual aspects of the record, I weigh them as equally, I would say, as the sonics. I think that’s where I can insert song titles – all the song titles on the record are related to Yuma.
There’s this tradition of stark solo or nearly solo acoustic guitar as an iconic sound of “the Wild West.” One of the first things I thought about listening to CRK is the score and soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain, so much of it is just solo plucked, tender guitar. Then of course in other music that evokes the West, you have sweeping strings and countrypolitan country and western. Even in that context you’ll often hear nylon-string guitar out front, solo. There’s something about unadorned guitar that is connected to landscapes.
But what I’m hearing you say is it’s not about translating the grandeur of Western landscapes at all. It’s about the grocery store, or it’s about the building that burned down, or it’s about a stretch of miles and miles of highway.
Totally. Yes. There’s so much programmed into the sound. David Rawling says, “The sound of a minor chord is a cowboy dying,” which is such a great way of saying that.
I believe this is true of the development of the flat-top guitar in general. At a certain point in 1934 or 1933, when the dreadnoughts start to get developed, there’s something about that that conveniently carries forward the agenda of interrelated musics – like Hawaiian music and bluegrass music for two totally different agendas. Then that [sound and body style] becomes the golden standard. But there were so many other brands and makers and thinkers from different cultures making guitars that, in an alternate universe not far from our own at all, would’ve been the golden standard. I feel the same way about the tradition of the music itself, right? And a dreadnought itself can do an infinite number of things, but just the format itself excludes a lot. As a constant instrument to play solo.
Another thing that David Rawlings says about his small guitar is that the smallest things sound the biggest, when they are in their own diorama – describing what he does with Gillian [Welch]. That’s his goal, to convince listeners that the “baby dinosaur” [small guitar] can actually eat them. Working in miniature, making little boats in glass bottles, you open yourself up, it’s an entire universe. The littlest things sound the biggest. In that way, there’s opportunity in the format itself.
I think people like Norman Blake and John Steinbeck are both hyper-regionalists who synthesize very eclectic sources to create something that is uniquely their own, but also totally comes outta left field. ‘Cause yeah, you think about Norman and certain people would say he is a flatpicker. Some people would say he was a pot smoking hippie who played with John Hartford – and they’re both equally true! Tying together otherwise disparate histories is a compelling format and is rewarding to the solo practitioner, I think.
We should talk about Steinbeck. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago when we first met by chance. But you starting the album with “Christmas in Yuma,” immediately I was like, “Oh, I know where we are. I know what we’re doing.” We’re in the West, there’s poetry/prose poetry happening. That song feels like it’s part of a longstanding tradition. Immediately I was thinking about a couple of my favorite Steinbeck passages listening to that.
Starting with poetry, starting with spoken word over that beautiful sound bed that you’ve created for it, what does that accomplish for you as an opening to a record?
Two things come to mind. Kenneth Patchen, who made these poetry records for the Folkways label in the ‘50s backed by a jazz band and it was almost comical, but he took it so seriously and it’s so convincing when you just forget what the format actually is. The great Texas – I don’t even wanna say outsider artist, but in terms of how he’s viewed – outsider artist Terry Allen, with some of his concept records like Lubbock (On Everything) with the pedal steel. You can do anything at that point. That’s why I started [CRK] out that way.
Also, quite frankly, Ice Cube’s records – I’m thinking of N.W.A. – start out with these sound collages of him getting arrested or walking down a cell block, or the imagined character is. To me, he could do anything after that point. He could make the amazing record that it became, or he could have done some something entirely different. I just think it’s an earnest way of saying, “I’m not trying to do what you [already] know.” We all know that everyone is infinitely complex, but in terms of what they release, it’s fine to not be infinitely complex?
For me, it’s not a flatpicking record. It’s not a fingerpicking record. I’m really not trying to make it a guitar record, so to speak. I wanted to make it a narrative record. [“Christmas in Yuma”] was just an earnest way of saying, “I’m not what you think I might be.”
It’s also a tradition in these roots and folk music spaces to play with expectation. People generally know what a solo guitar record is gonna sound like and what it’s gonna be and what it’s gonna do. I’m imagining a program director at a radio station putting on the record and doing the 30-second listen through – and the first song is poetry?!
I think maybe that’s what you’re talking about? Whatever conscious or subconscious projection you might have about what this album is in your hand, or what this is about to be as you put it on, you want to play with that projection. You’re saying, “I’m gonna tell you what this is.”
That is a beautiful point because, not to go too far back [in my history], but I was “unschooled” and I didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED. [Through all the hardships I’ve faced], I’ve learned this notion of leveraging. I surveyed how I was going to be able to reach people, and it gets more representative of myself as [time] goes. But it’s always been under the guise of leveraging unexpected muscle groups towards something else. That’s just built into this like fight or flight thing. I just have nothing to lose.
Your point about the radio DJ – or whoever that’s listening to the poetry – I think that’s a unique opportunity. At that point, they’re suspending judgment. If I wanna listen to a guitar record, I’m gonna listen to Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar. It’s perfect. It does exactly what it needs to do.
People should continue to try to make records like that. To me, it’s not a push against that at all. It’s starting out on a different foot. You may end up in a place that, by design, is very different than you would if you just tried to hit it on the nose. You can still hit it on the nose. Then you might even have a chance to open it up to somebody. Sometimes people just don’t know who Norman Blake is. But then, there’s a tune like “Yuma Ferry.” Who plays like that? Norman plays like that. If I were to make a whole record of “Yuma Ferry”-style tunes, I think everybody listening would know that it was a Norman Blake type of thing.
Let’s talk about “Christmas in Yuma” a little more in detail, because I’m curious about how you created it. Was it the poem that made the music happen, or the music demanded to have a poem set to it? What was the creative process like for the track?
I woke up from a nap on December 21, 2021, and I just went to Google Docs and typed it out. It just came out like that. The recording process, I had my friends Harry and Dylan sit down with me in our friend Marshall’s studio and we just recorded improvisations with the loose framework. [It’s read by my friend] Jack Kilmer, who similarly grew up in the Southwest. His father, like my mother, was also Christian Scientist. Those are all the things that were vibrating around. I was like, “He has to do it.” He’s an amazing voice actor, amazing actor, and just a great musician. Very musical and a beautiful artist. I had him do it first.
Then we went to the studio and we just said, “This is how long the track is. We’re not gonna play to the track. We’re just gonna play.” There was one take that was like the perfect length of time and I just put it under there. All those sonic features that interact with the vocal are totally incidental.
The music of CRK is so evocative and so visual and is so good at text painting, but I wanted to talk about your work in other media and about how you curated the package for the album, too. You’re so multifaceted in what media you’re working in – archives, photography, visual art, written word, music, melody. How do you see all those forms converging and diverging with this project specifically? Because I see your eye for detail at every level. You can just tell from the package that the whole thing is art to you, not just the songs.
Photography, it is always fiction. That, to me, is the beauty of it. If there’s a picture of someone jumping, you don’t really know where they jumped from. Or if they smile, they are actually crying? Maybe this person crying is not the good guy. Maybe they’re the bad guy.
You can start to track things like that, as the smile gets “invented” throughout photography. But it’s this line of fiction that, if you spend enough time with it, you can infer things right or wrong in there. They can all take you to a different place. Movies are that way, but you lose a little bit with the moving image. ‘Cause then you see the speed at which they’re moving, even if the frame rate isn’t representative of reality.
But then, say you’re playing jazz standards and you’re playing things with semantic content that came from a show, a Broadway show in the ‘40s. You’re shackled by the semantic content of that. I think it’s a convenient metaphor, in my opinion, to see photography and instrumental music as this thing, where – back to working in miniature – smaller things give you more room to insert yourself into it. I shouldn’t say more room, but there’s more fiction to play with, I would argue.
There’s less to compete with.
Right? In terms of things being programmed to you. In movies, you have the aesthetics, you have the costumes, you have the music, you have all this stuff. With photo books, the way that they’re sequenced by gestures is such a fitting way of dealing with sequencing things that aren’t visual. There’s a lot of inspiration from the photo book as a tradition, in terms of sequencing. And how with photojournalism, we don’t really have an American, coalesced identity of the West without the photography of the Dust Bowl. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at FSA photographs and there’s some great Dorothea Lange photographs in Yuma from May of 1935 which can be seen via the Library of Congress. I actually licensed one of them that was not within the purview of her [federal] work from the Oakland Museum and that’s in the song folio for CRK.
Obviously, Norman Blake is a really important musician to you and Dave Rawlings is as well. You’re talking about wanting to make music, wanting to make a record that isn’t just another acoustic guitar, flatpicking, flat-top record. Norman and Dave are great examples of guitarists who make albums that aren’t just the same old same old, and aren’t just products, they’re art. Both showcase that simple solo guitar, that miniature world we’re talking about, can be so expansive and huge and lush. But who are the others? Who are the folks that modeled for you that having your own voice and perspective on your instrument was more important than just doing it to do it. Or to be “best” or to sell yourself as a product for consumption?
For banjo, I think John Hartford. I love the idea that Blake Mills said, he called guitar an instrument for assholes. [Laughs] What I love about that is, no matter how you look at a guitar, the guitar is always a toy. [Andrés] Segovia tried to institute a formal repertoire. The bluegrass people tried to, the rock people [tried to]. Is Jimi Hendrix the definitive repertoire for the guitar? AC/DC? But, it’s still a toy. It’s still marketed as a toy.
I don’t need a million people to listen to my music to make a living or to keep doing it. It’s all within the art/archives, how to make these raw ingredients that are embedded into everyone into something that’s not commercial, but digestible.
In terms of other people [who inspired me]. John Fahey. Leo Kottke, but I didn’t fingerpick up until about three and a half years ago. About 80% of the record is finger picking. To your point about the poem earlier, there’s more outside of the solo, acoustic guitar canon of stuff, too. People like Rambling Jack Elliot and Sam Shepard, yeah.
One final point, I would play these solo concerts in Texas of just flatpicking melodies, like four flatpicking melodies in four different keys. And I was just like beating my head up against a wall, trying to tell some sort of cinematic, fiddle tune-driven [story over an entire set of just flatpicking]. I wanted there to be an arc. Through stubbornness, I decided I was going to learn how to fingerpick convincingly, where I had control of each voice. It’s really hard. It was a pain in my ass to figure that shit out.
But yeah, I see them all as tools: the poetry, the flatpicking, the fingerpicking, the drumming. It could be seen as pushing back against commercialism or whatever, but in some ways it’s actually the opposite. I was like, “I want more. I want a diverse audience. I want as many people to listen to this as possible.” Not sheer numbers, but in terms of who they are and what their listening diets are. Not just everybody in the audience being someone who will already know each of those fiddle tunes.
A year ago today, on April 7, 2024, the American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville was packed to the gills with rabid flatpicking fans, geared up for a special appearance by two of the greats: Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton. Far from their first show together or their first collaboration, it was still one of the hottest tickets in Nashville and fans lined up down the sidewalk and up the drive of the humble Legion for their chance to witness bluegrass guitar history in the making.
To the delight of the many hundreds of thousands who would have but couldn’t also squeeze into the cinder block building known for two-stepping, honky-tonkin’, and bluegrass jams, today Strings and Sutton surprise released a live-recorded album of that evening’s show, Live at the Legion. Available digitally – with CDs and vinyl on the way August 1, and physical pre-order open now – it’s a two-disc, 20-song collection of traditional tunes, medleys, covers, and two of the most personality-rich and unique improvisational voices on the instrument.
Strings makes it no secret that, like many younger guitar pickers in bluegrass and adjacent styles, Bryan Sutton is a hero. The two have collaborated often in the past, formally and informally, getting together for jams and lessons, Strings appearing at and attending Sutton’s Blue Ridge Guitar Camp, performing as a duo at the Station Inn, Sutton guesting on stage with Strings and band, and more.
These are two generational talents, understood within and outside of bluegrass to be standard-setters for the instrument and for flatpicking at large. Together, their musical dialogues are entrancing, exciting, and as charming as they are downright unpredictable. Billy’s power and aggression on the six-string ease, while each player listens ardently and responds to the other with comfortability, or a wink, or a tasteful counterpoint, or an outburst-inducing surprise. Sutton is endlessly lyrical, drawing out such responses from Strings. For their level of chops, the collection rarely strays into self-involved jamming or ego-driven ideas.
Later this year, in September, Strings and Sutton will perform a short series of intimate duo shows to celebrate Live at the Legion – and give any who couldn’t be there in East Nashville in 2024 for the taping of the album another chance to catch the magic. The pair will appear at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky; at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium; in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and in Boone, North Carolina with accompaniment by Strings’ bassist, Royal Masat. Due to anticipated demand, tickets for any/all of the shows must be requested by April 21, 2025, after which lottery winners will be notified. Sign up to request tickets here.
Bluegrass boasts many an iconic duo album, especially focused on the guitar. In the future, will we group Live at the Legion alongside other such definitive recordings as Blake & Rice? It seems almost inevitable. From Blake & Rice to Skaggs & Whitley, Watson & Monroe, and Grisman & Garcia – or even the just-released Carter & Cleveland – it seems immediately clear Billy Strings & Bryan Sutton’s Live at the Legion will be going down in bluegrass history. Tuck into this double album delight to see and hear why for yourself.
With joy, gratitude, and undeniable talent, composer and innovative guitarist Yasmin Williams shines in her first official NPR Tiny Desk Concert – and we can’t stop watching! Flanked by a crew of seven musical collaborators – including old-time music powerhouses Tatiana Hargreaves and Allison de Groot – Williams shares four original songs, “Hummingbird,” “Sisters,” “Guitka,” and “Restless Heart.” While the 23-minute performance is firmly rooted in Williams’ characteristic style, her songs transcend easy genre labels, inhabiting a musical atmosphere of their own. What results is a collection of thoughtful, intricate, and heart-led songs that bring the listener firmly and gently into the present moment.
Starting off with a decidedly bluegrass and old-time-inspired composition, “Hummingbird,” Williams is joined by Hargreaves and de Groot, who recorded and released the track together with Williams in 2024, ahead of the release of her third studio album, Acadia. Williams and her band then widen their reach, drawing on African folk music traditions and modern experimental and atmospheric soundscapes. The instrumental lineup is impressively wide for such a brief performance, featuring a kalimba taped to the top of Williams’ guitar (that she plays with one hand while playing the guitar with the other), a 10-foot-wide marimba, multiple violins and violas, a djembe, tap shoes, and more.
If you’re new to the world of Yasmin Williams, this video is the perfect place to start – and you can continue exploring with our recent Artist of the Month coverage from October of last year. (Find additional BGS content on Williams below.) Her performance is meditative, emotive, and soothing, but it’s also energizing and inspiring. In this way, Williams has a knack for duality. Her songs are both intricate and subtle. They’re complex without feeling math-y or inaccessible. Focusing in on her fingerstyle and tapping techniques, her technical skill is obvious. She’s deliberate, precise, and truly a master of her craft. But there’s also incredible ease in the way Williams plays. She’s joyful and present, embodying a wholesome “just-happy-to-be-here” energy. At just 28 years old, her immense skill is perfectly balanced with a sense of comfort and familiarity, making this performance a gift to behold.
While this is Yasmin Williams’ first official Tiny Desk Concert shot on-site at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., it’s not her first foray into the world of NPR Music. She’s been orbiting the legendary “tiny” desk (which she humorously admits feeling disappointed isn’t actually that tiny) for years. In 2018, Williams submitted a video of her song “Guitka” to the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. A year later, she was featured by NPR Music’s Night Owl series. Then in 2021, she landed her first Tiny Desk spot through NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series. But as Williams shares, none of that compared to the feeling of finally getting to sit behind that actually-pretty-big desk. We’re so glad she made it.
Bluegrass. Newgrass. Chambergrass. Jamgrass. Thrashgrass. So many sub-genres, so little time. For guitarist Jordan Tice – solo artist and longtime member of Nashville-based Hawktail – there’s no time at all, because labels don’t define art and they don’t factor into his creative process.
“I don’t necessarily think about it,” he says. “I mostly do what I feel like doing and incorporate sounds that feel relevant, that I have a personal connection to and an excitement to explore, and the ability to replicate and share. I’d like to think that personality can unite disparate things if the heart is pure.”
Tice weaves a thread of musical connectivity on his new release, Badlettsville. The EP features two covers, Bob Dylan’s “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and Randy Newman’s “Dayton, Ohio – 1903,” as well as the originals “Mean Old World” and the instrumental title track. The four are staples of his live shows, but only now have they been committed to recordings.
“They’re all fundamental to my show and are requested as much as my other songs, but they didn’t have a place on either the last record or the next one, so they belonged in Badlettsville,” he says. “They fit together sonically as well. As soon as we got those four things down, I was like, ‘This is something.’”
Ever busy, Tice isn’t slowing down in 2025, although the emphasis is shifting somewhat. After two hectic years, Hawktail is dialing back a bit on gigging and Tice is devoting time to another solo album. “Hawktail has an EP in the can that will hopefully get out sometime soon,” he says. “We’re doing a few festival gigs but taking a much lighter year. I’m doing some dates in support of [Badlettsville], in addition to festivals with Hawktail. But I’m trying to take a little bit of a step back to focus on making this new record.”
Your website bio begins, “Jordan Tice is a musical seeker of the most dedicated sort.” What does the term “musical seeker” mean to you?
Jordan Tice: I’m always exploring my own interests and creativity, and also exploring the music that I do play, the roots of that. I want to understand myself and everything I do, and everything that came before me, better.
Part of the art of music is communicating to anybody, not particularly musicians. The more you understand about music in general, the more you understand what works and what doesn’t. The more you do it, get out there, and play and make records, the more you understand how things register and land with people – different types of thoughts and sentiments, things like that. Music is the art of sculpting sound within a given amount of time for someone who’s giving you their ear.
How has that manifested itself over the course of your solo albums and Hawktail?
With everything you do, there’s something you want to repeat about it, but there’s also things you want to do differently. I mostly grew up writing instrumental music and Hawktail is entirely instrumental. Long about 2015 or 2016, I started writing songs like crazy, just out of nowhere, and I realized I needed an outlet for that. But the instrumental stuff is still near and dear. Keeping a foot in both doors allows me to scratch this itch and this love for both of these things I do.
Did moving to Nashville have something to do with your songwriting?
I think so. I can’t provide concrete evidence, but the coincidence is too great – the fact that I started writing songs right when I moved to Nashville. So the answer is yes, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how. I also started hanging out with a lot more songwriters. My community was more instrumental-based in Boston and New York, where I lived before, so there’s definitely the influence of some new friends I made upon moving down here.
You’ve been playing guitar since you were 12. Does it sometimes feel the same today as it did then?
Yeah. I actually started taking lessons again, from a classical guitar teacher, just because I have some time off the road this winter. There’s things I wanted to improve and I decided I needed some help. I’m always trying to improve, always listening to things, and even in the music I love, there’s still the same sense of mystery of, “How did they do that?” The breadth of everything you’re aware of and assimilated expands, but at the same time it’s the same old [thing].
What led you to classical training?
We’re not doing classical music per se, I should clarify. But a lot of the things I was hoping to work on were technical-based, and classical guitar has such a codified, rigorous, technical study and a pedagogy related to technique in a way that other genres don’t necessarily have.
I’ve studied a lot of facets of music, but I’m not formally trained by any stretch. I took some jazz guitar lessons here and there, and I studied composition, but in terms of guitar I’ve never had formal technical training. I felt I was up against some roadblocks and walls with my playing and decided I needed the help of an expert, a teacher. This [teacher] came strongly recommended from my friend Chris Eldridge from Punch Brothers, and it’s been rewarding to expand the technical facility side of things.
You played a Preston Thompson Brazilian Rosewood and your main guitar, a Collings, on Badlettsville. Tell us about those guitars.
I was at Laurie Lewis’s house in Berkeley with Brittany [Haas] from Hawktail. We were in town playing and we were helping her move some furniture. She had this Preston Thompson in the corner that she was trying to sell and I was interested. It’s from 2016. She hand-selected the cut of Brazilian rosewood, a beautiful piece of wood, and had them make it with this wood that she had sourced. I absolutely love it. It’s going to be my main touring guitar for my solo stuff coming up.
The Collings is a D1A mahogany dreadnought that I bought in 2014. It’s perfectly balanced. It almost sounds like an old guitar. The overtones are exactly right. I have a relationship with Collings, but I bought this one at The Music Emporium in Boston because I liked it so much. It’s been my main axe for the last ten years. It’s what I play in Hawktail and what I recorded my last solo record on.
I brought both of those guitars to the studio, in addition to this new Yamaha FG Indian rosewood guitar that I’ve been working with them for the last couple years to promote and develop. They’re great guitars, and it was a fun process getting to work with them and help get the word out. They’re really fantastic.
How do your picking styles with Hawktail, on your solo work, and with other artists come together to create your style?
I write a lot of music, so my identity as a writer maybe puts those things in the same world. So I would say that it’s filtered through the same mind, and also the conceit is that it’s my music. Hawktail is collaborative, obviously, but it’s part of the same musical world.
I’ve always looked up to Norman Blake and Doc Watson. Norman Blake does a lot of different things, but you don’t really think about it. He plays fingerstyle, flatpicking, traditional music, writes his own music, but it all makes sense in the context of his world. I’ve always admired that as an archetype for a folk musician. He’s himself first. He’s not a historian. He picks and chooses things that work in his musical world, as opposed to something outside of himself. He’s an artist that happens to combine all these folk music techniques and sources into something that’s his own.
You’re thought of primarily as an acoustic player, but you also play electric guitar. Which ones?
I grew up playing rock and roll, in addition to bluegrass and things like that. My first music was the Allman Brothers. I got together with this guy in my church and he showed me the twin lead thing. We’d learn the two leads and then we’d switch. That music is near and dear to me – Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers. So I’ve always played a little electric too. I think it’s going to work its way into the next album.
My main electric is an American Standard Telecaster that I swapped out some of the pickups and modified a little bit. I put a higher-output Seymour Duncan pickup in the neck position and I made it a four-way switch, so you have the humbucker setting in addition to the normal three settings.
Also I have a Yamaha Revstar Professional that they just sent that I’ve been having fun with as well.
What do acoustic and electric guitar each bring out in your playing?
An electric allows you the opportunity to fill up a room with less effort. You can saturate a room with sounds with less notes, with less physical effort. An acoustic is a parlor instrument. It’s meant to be played in a small room with your head right up against it. As soon as you stop making noises with your hands, the noise goes away. With electric, a lot of times less is much more, and with acoustic, a medium amount is a medium amount.
With this new record, I’m going to do it with drums, so I’ve been messing around with pickups on electrics and … I don’t want to say effects, but ways to expand the breadth of the sound, get a little bit of that electric expanse, but still treating it like it’s an acoustic. That’s been a fun and interesting pursuit.
How does collaborating with other musicians push you musically?
I have a little home studio setup, but I love going to the studio. I love there being, “This is the time that we’re making the record. What happens, happens.” I think that urgency puts you into a superpower mode. Also the camaraderie. There is truly no substitute for live chemistry. AI can try all it wants, but it will never get it. The communication and sound that happens … there’s so much subconscious and physical factors that are changing constantly. You can’t substitute it.
I love the element of not trying to perfect things, of a record being a snapshot in time. Treating it that way helps you bring your A-game because it’s, “I need to be able to do this at any given time.” It makes you focus on delivering a performance, crossing all your T’s and dotting your I’s, so that it’s all there when it’s time to push “play,” or when it’s time to play with other people, or time to get in front of people.
What snapshot does Badlettsville represent?
The tunes weren’t created or arranged with the idea that they’d be on a record, so in some ways it’s like a snapshot of the live show I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. It’s really organic in that regard.
All these arrangements came about from playing live, specifically with Paul Kowert and Patrick M’Gonigle. Patrick’s been playing a lot of shows with me, and Paul is my BFF partner in crime in Hawktail and beyond, so it represents my relationship with those two guys in a big way.
Also my interests, the fact that there’s cover songs by Randy Newman and Bob Dylan. If I had to pick my two favorite songwriters, it would be them. It’s a snapshot in time of the manner in which I’m playing and thinking about music and the people I’m doing it with right now.
In a black ruffled shirt on a brightly colored stage, Tommy Emmanuel sits with his guitar and, like always, amazes the audience with his music. His latest video, “Gdansk/Tall Fiddler (Live at The Sydney Opera House)” is an upbeat and beautiful showcase of his songs that demonstrates the excitement and ease Emmanuel brings to his music. The medley is a single from his forthcoming album, Live at the Sydney Opera House, out March 21.
The clip starts off with a new original, “Gdansk,” named after Gdansk, Poland, where Emmanuel wrote the tune. It’s soft yet energetic, emulating the feeling of calm ocean waves on a sunny day that at the same time brings energy and joy to the music. The peaceful and uplifting melody might make you want to get up and dance.
“Gdansk” then beautifully leads into another tune of Emmanuel’s entitled “Tall Fiddler,” a number off Emmanuel’s 2006 release Endless Road that was inspired by the great fiddler Byron Berline. With fast licks and a rock and roll feel, he effortlessly transitions between a bluegrass fiddle tune and a heavy, rocking vibe.
It’s easy to see the excitement Emmanuel brings to playing and performing. The way he just “goes for it” is utterly inspiring – you can see how the music takes over him as he becomes the vessel that brings it into fruition.
It’s certainly true that the Grateful Dead were never a bluegrass band, starting with the fact that their lineup had not just one drummer, but two. And yet it also can’t be denied that the group’s musical DNA has a wide streak of bluegrass deep within, both in terms of licks and improvisational flair.
In large part, that’s due to the late Jerry Garcia – “Captain Trips” – who started out as a banjo player before finding his most famous calling as the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist. Before that, Garcia played in folk circles for years, and his many extracurricular collaborators included David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Don Reno, Chubby Wise and other titans of the genre. More than a quarter-century before O Brother, Where Art Thou? took bluegrass to the top of the charts, Garcia’s 1973 side project, Old & In the Way, stood as the top-selling bluegrass album of all time.
Garcia and the Dead’s bluegrass bona fides are solid indeed, as shown by artifacts like the Pickin’ on the Grateful Dead series (not to mention Grass Is Dead, a tribute act). But maybe the strongest testament to the strength of the Dead’s bluegrass-adjacent side is what other artists have made of their catalog. Countless bluegrass musicians have covered Dead songs in ways that would appeal to even the staunchest chair-snapping purists. Here are some of the best.
“Friend of the Devil” – The Travelin’ McCourys (2019)
This rounder’s tale is the granddaddy of ’em all, a bluegrass staple from almost the moment it appeared on the Dead’s 1970 proto-Americana classic, American Beauty. Long a picking-circle staple at festivals, it’s been covered by everybody from Tony Rice to Elvis Costello. But here is a fantastic cover by one of the finest family bands in all of bluegrass, captured onstage at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in 2019. In contrast to the manic pace of the original, this version proceeds at more of an elegant glide. But it’s still got plenty of get-up-and-go, with killer solos over walking bass and a great Ronnie McCoury lead vocal.
“Dire Wolf” – Molly Tuttle (2022)
Among the most acclaimed young artists in bluegrass, Molly Tuttle is a two-time Guitar Player of the Year winner from the International Bluegrass Music Association. She also won IBMA’s Album of the Year trophy for 2022’s Crooked Tree, which included the 1970 Workingman’s Dead standard “Dire Wolf” as a bonus track. Equal parts folk fable and murder ballad, it’s something like “Little Red Riding Hood” with an unhappy ending. And Tuttle’s vocal is even more striking than her guitar-playing.
“Wharf Rat” – Billy Strings (2020)
Possibly even more acclaimed as a guitarist is William “Billy Strings” Apostol, another IBMA Awards fixture (and multiple Entertainer of the Year winner) who is frequently likened to Doc Watson. But few guitarists have ever conjured up Garcia’s sound, spirit, and all-around vibe as effectively as Strings. A song about a lost soul in a seaside town, “Wharf Rat” first came out on the Dead’s eponymous 1971 live album. Strings’ 2020 live version from the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, is amazing, as Strings doesn’t sing it so much as inhabit it. The money shot is his guitar solo that begins just after the five-minute mark.
“Scarlet Begonias” – The Infamous Stringdusters (2020)
Gambling is one of the Dead’s recurrent tropes and “Scarlet Begonias” gives it a playful spin with a loping guitar riff. The original dates back to 1974’s From the Mars Hotel and it’s been widely covered in oddball styles by the likes of electronic duo Thievery Corporation and the ska band Sublime. But “Scarlet Begonias” has never had it so well as in this excellent bluegrass version by The Infamous Stringdusters, shot onstage at Seattle’s Showbox just ahead of the pandemic in early 2020.
“Ripple” – Dale Ann Bradley (2019)
More often than not, vocals tended to be the Dead’s weak link. But that is not a problem for Kentucky Music Hall of Famer and five-time IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Dale Ann Bradley. The elegiac “Ripple” began life as the B-side to the “Truckin’” single and was also a show-stopper on the Dead’s 1981 acoustic live album, Reckoning. Bradley covered it on her 2019 LP, The Hard Way, with Tina Adair providing truly lovely vocal harmonies.
“Uncle John’s Band” – Fireside Collective (2022)
One of the Dead’s folksiest numbers, “Uncle John’s Band” kicked off Workingman’s Dead at an easy-going amble – a clear departure from the psychedelic excursions of the Dead’s earliest work. This live version by the young Asheville, North Carolina, band Fireside Collective reimagines “Uncle John’s Band” as sprawling jam-band fodder.
“Cassidy” – Greensky Bluegrass (2007)
“Cassidy” first appeared on-record as a Bob Weir solo tune on his 1972 side-project album, Ace, but it’s been on multiple Dead live albums over the years. It’s always been something of an enigma, inspired by a young girl as well as Neal Cassady. Michigan jamgrass ensemble Greensky Bluegrass gets to its beat-poet heart on this version from 2007’s Live at Bell’s.
“Tennessee Jed” – Front Country (2018)
A frequent theme for the Dead was being in motion, whether traveling toward something or running away from it. So it follows that homesickness would be an aspect of their music, perhaps most overtly on this wistful song from the double-live LP, Europe ’72. California’s Front Country put “Tennessee Jed” through its paces in this 2018 version from their “Kitchen Covers” series.
“Touch of Grey” – Love Canon (2014)
If the Dead wasn’t a bluegrass band, they most definitely weren’t a pop band, either. But the group had occasional brushes with the Hot 100, most famously with the 1970 statement of purpose “Truckin’” and its “what a long strange trip it’s been” tagline (even though the group had only been together about five years by then). “Truckin’” stalled out at No. 64 and was later eclipsed by its 1987 sequel “Touch of Grey” – an actual Top 10 hit with its bittersweet conclusion, “We will get by, we will survive.”
From Charlottesville, Virginia, Love Canon strips away the ’80s pop keyboards and covers the song well as straight-up bluegrass on 2014’s “Dead Covers Project.”
Photo Credit: Old & In the Way, courtesy of Acoustic Disc.
Chris Eldridge and I met when I stepped off of an elevator with my bass at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s convention in 2004. The Infamous Stringdusters were forming in Nashville at the time and they needed a bass player for the jam that night and, it turned out, for the band in general. We spent the first two years of that band traveling and making music together and Chris is still one of my favorite musicians and humans. A member of Punch Brothers and Mighty Poplar, he’s also made a couple great records with guitarist Julian Lage and plays in a duo with his wife Kristen Andreassen. Our conversation started when he arrived at my house and didn’t end until he pulled out of the driveway the next day, but we’ve captured some of the best parts here for the podcast.
This episode was recorded live at 185 King St in Brevard, NC on November 12, 2024
Photo Credit: Laura E Partain
Editor’s Note: The Travis Book Happy Hour is hosted by Travis Book of the GRAMMY Award-winning band, The Infamous Stringdusters. The show’s focus is musical collaboration and conversation around matters of being. The podcast includes highlights from Travis’s interviews and music from each live show recorded in Brevard, North Carolina.
The Travis Book Happy Hour is brought to you by Thompson Guitars and is presented by Americana Vibes and The Bluegrass Situation as part of the BGS Podcast Network. You can find the Travis Book Happy Hour on Instagram and Facebook and online at thetravisbookhappyhour.com.
Most listeners would probably attribute the incredibly unique musical approach of guitarist Beppe Gambetta to his country of origin. Being a native of Genoa, Italy, he certainly brings a global and European folk flair to his bluegrass and old-time inflected six-string compositions. But it would be shortsighted to simply credit that truly original voice to mere geography.
Gambetta is an instrumentalist who always works with intention. Developed over a lifetime of playing and cultural cross pollination, his style exists in the fertile ground somewhere between a triangulation of Norman Blake, Doc Watson, and Django Reinhardt. He’s learned from, recorded, collaborated, and performed with so many of “greats” such as these across several generations of American roots music virtuosos. Gambetta is a bluegrasser through and through, but he’s also so much more.
His latest album, Terra Madre (released in April 2024), is a lovely continuation of his lengthy and harlequin catalog of recordings. It’s bilingual, cinematic, and thoughtful, while also impassioned and brash. But he’s never a one-note musician, so the collection is artfully subtle at the same time. Gambetta doesn’t just know this intersection – aggressive and gentle, bold and subdued – it’s as if he lives there. It’s his address.
Perhaps most of all, Gambetta is a perfect representation of how an individual can bring himself into a generational folkway and established aural tradition such as American roots music, while simultaneously preserving his selfhood and his singular point of view. Our email interview, like the new record, is a perfect representation of Gambetta’s melting pot style – and the way he uses the entire earth, terra madre, as his medium.
The title track of Terra Madre is cinematic and vibey, with a bit of funk and a dash of charming silliness. I love that it starts with the sound of footsteps, grounding the listener on terra madre herself. Can you talk a bit about the song, its title, and how being embodied on earth, on this rock hurtling through space, inspires your music and songwriting?
The song “Terra Madre” is the most dramatic of the album: the footsteps are from a couple of escaping refugees, the song is about their dreams. They meet with friends and jump the border wall in the dark of the night with fear, pain and hope. We don’t know the exact story, the place where it happens is also unknown in order to represent a ubiquitous pain that can be found all over the world.
It was hard to express these extremely dramatic sentiments only with acoustic instruments, but the use of the flatpicking style with strong bass lines and heavy strums turned out to be a good tool. I used a regular guitar but also a low bouzouki guitar and few slide guitars “prepared” with special strings and tunings. As you noticed, I added the sound of the escaping steps in order to ground the listener to the earth and with drummer Joe Bonadio we decided not to use the snare drum in order to create a more “suspended” atmosphere only with toms and cymbals.
How much of the earth’s current worries are in this album? How much did the planet’s current state of being inform the song itself?
The album’s general concept is related to the cry of pain that rises from our Earth and to the right of musicians to dream about a better world in moments of darkness. In the different songs there are dreams for a better life, for peace, repentance, friendship through music, adventure, forgiveness, survival of minority cultures, redemption, dreams to win, rage, envy, hate, and more.
In a period where leaders and politicians in charge are not able to resolve conflicts and crises there is a need for every other category to give a positive contribution. Probably scientists, philosophers, historians, theologists will give important contributions, but also artists can do their part.
I’m sure that even in modern times there is still a strong power that comes from folk songs and I decided to write my songs in different languages. For different reasons the album is totally self-produced and if you self-produce you need to put more love, passion, time, and money using all your resources.
“Sit and Pick with You” is certainly the stand out track on the album. Can you talk a bit about that song, its meaning, and how important the community aspect of this music is? Because, truly none of us would exist as pickers in bluegrass and string band music without folks – whether friends or peers or heroes or legends – to sit and pick with.
The inspiration for the song came to me during a California tour. I wrote it in order to celebrate some musical encounters with legendary fathers of the music – David Grisman, Dan Crary, Peter Rowan – dear friends who, at the end of their careers, continue to hold high the torch of beauty. I wrote the song with the sounds of the 1930s in mind, with a guitar riff inspired by “The Wildwood Flower” or “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” because I believe it is a timeless sound that can still speak to people’s hearts and move them.
I decided to sing the song as a duo, like an old brother duet. I first asked Norman Blake by sending him a handwritten letter in pencil, as we used to do in our correspondence in the 1980s. The reply was really kind, also handwritten by Nancy and signed by Norman, who thanked me for the thought and encouraged me in the project, but at that time Norman felt that his voice was not at the right level to appear on an album.
Luckily, my friend Tim O’Brien was available to sing it and did it with a perfect vintage-style rendition. Then David Grisman added his unmistakable signature [sound] on mandolin. Dan Crary played guitar in harmony, taking advantage of the depth of his “long neck” guitar tuned down a tone. The final touch to the quartet’s sound came from bassist Travis Book.
The positive meaning of the song is felt by many fans who identify with the sentiments it expresses: The joy of getting together and the friendship that comes from the beauty of music. Many began to incorporate it into their jam sessions with friends, as it happened at the Walnut Valley Festival campground in Winfield, Kansas, a gathering place for music lovers par excellence. I received many requests for the guitar part and finally now I distribute the tablature at all my concerts. For sure, this is the standout track of the album and it got a very special recognition and attention. It was number one in the Folk DJ chart in June and July and still now it is present in the top positions.
Your approach to the guitar – and really, to music and composition and picking in general – is totally unique. You have a voice all your own on the instrument. I think a lot of listeners on this side of the Atlantic would attribute that to your being Italian, but I think that’s a bit shortsighted and simplistic. How have you cultivated your particular style and how do you keep your music and creativity fresh and innovative, to yourself and to your listeners?
I wanted to develop my own particular voice, starting from the style of the American fathers and filtering in the influences gained during my tireless journey on the road that has given me particularly formative encounters, not only in Italy but in the whole world. It took time and attention, choosing and adding to my style drops of beauty from different sources, trying to limit the obvious “Tony Rice mania” and using ideas also from Dan, Norman, Clarence and much more.
For sure, all my studies about old Italian music and generally my natural Italian aesthetic sense and passion for melody has influenced my style. The work that I did in researching and studying the “Italian string virtuosi” and performing the albums Serenata and Traversata (produced with David Grisman) left an important mark in my playing.
Studies and stylistic research in flatpicking can go in different and almost opposite directions. On the one hand, the virtuosity of breathtaking phrasing combined with speed and improvisation – the shiver in your spine that you start to feel when you listen for the first time to “Black Mountain Rag.” On the other hand, the search for expressive techniques and melodies that touch the listener’s soul – the passion and tenderness of “Church Street Blues” in Tony Rice’s version is the perfect eye-opener to the expressive potential of flatpicking beyond mere circus performance.
This second aspect, probably underestimated in the current scene, is the one that fascinated me the most. I worked a lot to learn to play slow (using tremolos, partial strummings, crosspicking, and “separate crosspicking” on two, four, five, six strings, string jumps, crosspicking to obtain grace notes, etc.).
Rhythmic tension and speed, however, continue to fascinate me; it was fun to develop the licks of my tune “Chipmunk,” an instrumental that describes the run of New Jersey’s fastest pet on the front porch of our Stockton home, using down-down-up on two strings at 162 beats.
The secret of the freshness of my style stays in continuing to be excited by both creating something new and playing something old, and in sharing this happiness every day with my wife Federica! Often before taking the stage I revive the memory of those who helped me and believed in my art (Mama Gambetta first of all) and this gives me a strong power. Even if I am close to my seventieth birthday I continue to be ready and happy to do my job.
I also think your shows are so stunning and one-of-a-kind, too. You do so much with just a guitar, your voice, and your stories. How do you keep your show engaging and interesting, when you have so few variables or so few inputs? Do you find such a stark set up to be limiting or empowering or…
Standing in front of an audience with one guitar, a voice, and a pick is certainly a big challenge. That is why I have been working over the years to create a show that I can take to audiences around the world and to distant places. I try to speak to people’s hearts and maintain my authenticity, deciding to minimize the use of excessive volume, technology, and sound effects, avoiding wiggles and winks, and simply presenting myself as I am, as if I were playing acoustically in a living room.
An artist who influenced me in this direction was John Hartford, for whom I opened a concert in Ohio many years ago and I was inspired by his charisma in communicating alone with the audience. Over the years I have studied singing, learned how to narrate and create special atmospheres with the use of open tunings and different languages, and also to joke with the audience with “Old World” irony. Not to mention “Gino,” the name I gave to my pedal loop, which I always use sparingly and treat as an old cousin who travels with me and accompanies me with his guitar.
In music, limitations are often a source of creativity; Django Reinhardt invented amazing phrases using only two fingers of the left hand, blues harmonica players got missing notes by inventing bending, and so on. In flatpicking, the strong limitation is the inability to play two distant strings at the same time as you would do easily with fingers. The effort to overcome this limitation has always forced me to invent creative solutions.
Can you tell us the story or stories behind “Saint James Hospital”?
In 2023, on the centenary of Doc Watson’s birth, in addition to visiting his grave and playing a tune for him, I decided to rearrange some of the master’s songs so that I could celebrate him on many occasions, because Doc was my most important influence and changed my artistic life.
Doc was a giant because he invented a fresh repertoire for the acoustic guitar and developed a unique and engaging way of building a show. Among the various songs of his repertoire, “Saint James Hospital” represents his extraordinary ability to discover and rearrange true gems of beauty. “Saint James Hospital” comes from ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s earliest field recordings, when he was first allowed to record the prisoners in a Huntsville, Texas, jail in 1933. Among the various prisoners was James Baker, known as “Iron Head,” and from this seemingly dangerous character came a song with a refined and touching melody that spoke of repentance, redemption, and a dream of a better end of life.
For me it was a challenge to create a new arrangement after Doc Watson’s and Tony Rice’s masterpieces. I decided to invent a new interlude using many guitars in different tunings and I completed the arrangement on the high register with the arpeggio of a Cuban tres. The result was well-rewarded because also “Saint James Hospital” appeared for many months on the Folk DJ charts.
What’s next for Beppe Gambetta? What should folks be watching out for?
One of the reasons I continue to be active and innovative with so many projects is because I am lucky enough not to have a retirement plan! It’s a joke that tells the truth: The anxiety of having to keep working for a long time feeds my creativity and helps my determination to invent new music, new productions, new events and embark on new journeys.
Future projects fortunately are many, first of all the upcoming tours in America and Europe in support of Terra Madre.
Besides touring, an event I’m very excited about will happen on February 15, 2025 in Mendocino, California. It will be a reunion concert with Dan Crary, who just turned 85. We will celebrate his legacy and more than 30 years of touring as a duo. On May 15-16-17, 2025 there will be the 25th edition of my Acoustic Nights, a thematic concert series with international artists on the stage of the Teatro Nazionale in Genoa, Italy, an event that we conceived with [my wife] Federica and made grow over the years. The edition number 25 promises to be a beautiful big party with a large audience of friends who will come from far away to celebrate.
Also, in Italy, I produced two different plays with actors and script, one related to my autobiographical book, Declarations of Love, and the other related to songs about legendary bandits.
Among the American projects I would like to mention, the trio show about Italian virtuosi of the early 20th century with Mike Guggino and Barrett Smith (members of Steep Canyon Rangers). It is a “side” project that is growing over the years and for the first time we will take it to a festival, Wintergrass, in 2025.
With the Folk Project in Morristown, New Jersey, we started an annual event, the New Jersey Guitar Summit, an educational full-immersion event with a final concert (held in October). And also in New Jersey on January 11 and 12 we will have my “home concerts” with guest Bruce Molsky at the Prallsville Mills in Stockton, New Jersey.
If there were any picker, living or passed, that you could sit and pick with today, who would it be and why?
In this respect I am very fulfilled, because one of the greatest joys of my artistic life is that at different times I was able to play “Salt Creek” with Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Dan Crary, and Tony Rice, four fathers of the music I love.
Of course, if I had the time machine, I would also choose to play “Salt Creek” with another great father of flatpicking, Clarence White, who I never met because he died young in a car accident. Using the same time machine I would certainly travel to Paris to play with Django Reinhardt, then I would move to Argentina to make music with the tanguero Roberto Grela. In Portugal it would be wonderful to meet the Portuguese guitar passion of Carlos Peredes, while in Italy I would certainly love to meet the early 20th century virtuoso Pasquale Taraffo, the inspiration for so much of my research.
The most enjoyable jam session of the last few years was with guitarist Cameron Knowler, a young picker who amazed me by cultivating and carrying forward into modern times the sounds of Riley Puckett and Norman Blake, a sign that among the new generations there is a refined aesthetic sense that goes beyond fashions and gives us hope for the continuation of the forgotten beauties of the past.
Photo Credit: Giovanna Cavallo
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