Tag: Greensky Bluegrass

Earl Scruggs Music Festival Honors a Bluegrass Banjo Hero

Posted on by Editor

The sheer beauty and alluring magic of the Earl Scruggs Music Festival is akin to the film Field of Dreams. That adage of, “If you build it, they will come.”

Why else would one of the premier bluegrass gatherings be held at an equestrian center in the middle of nowhere, just off a rural highway, surrounded by vast farm fields in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, and work to absolute perfection year after year?

Well, it does. And for its fifth anniversary, the festival, held at Tryon International, once again invited a slew of the marquee names when it comes to the “high, lonesome sound” and those arena acts orbiting the genre itself: The Avett Brothers, Greensky Bluegrass, The Del McCoury Band, Béla Fleck, Rhonda Vincent & The Rage, Alison Brown, Mountain Grass Unit, Lindsay Lou, Della Mae, East Nash Grass, The Earls of Leicester, and more.

“He was my gateway. If it weren’t for Earl, I wouldn’t be me,” says Brown, a world-renowned banjoist and co-founder of Compass Records. “Earl was a traditionalist, in the sense that he created this style that we all play, which we consider to be the cornerstone of bluegrass. But, he was an adventurer. He was not afraid to take the banjo to places it hadn’t been before.”

Born just down the road from the festival grounds in Cleveland County in 1924, Scruggs revolutionized the banjo when he perfected a three-finger approach to the instrument. With clawhammer banjo using down-picking (using the thumb and middle or index finger), “Scruggs Style” utilized the thumb, middle and index, resulting in a rapid picking tempo known as “rolls.”

“When I was first starting to learn [banjo], I was playing out of the Earl Scruggs book,” says Michael Bont, banjoist for Greensky Bluegrass. “And I’ll never forget, there was this morning where I had been practicing the rolls and trying to play the songs, and it was ‘Little Cabin Home on the Hill.’ That’s the song [where I went], ‘Oh my god, I’m doing it.’ It never ceases to amaze me [how Earl developed] this new style of playing an instrument.”

At age 21, Scruggs joined Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. On Dec. 8, 1945, Scruggs found himself on the Grand Ole Opry at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium when Monroe debuted his new sound to numerous standing ovations. Although Monroe had built this “muscle car” of a band that would showcase a whole new genre of music, it was Scruggs who was the gasoline that put Monroe’s vision into motion. Not long after, Scruggs would form the wildly popular Flatt & Scruggs with his Blue Grass Boys bandmate, guitarist Lester Flatt; when that duo broke up, he created the groundbreaking Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons Randy and Gary. A third son, Steve, later joined the group, too. In 2012, Earl Scruggs passed away at age 88.

Behind the festival is a partnership between the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby (in Cleveland County), Isothermal Community College and WNCW 88.7 FM (both located in nearby Spindale). Coming together to share the story of Scruggs and expand his legacy in the 21st century, the trio built this annual gathering from the ground up, where it’s now become a bona fide bastion of bluegrass music and camaraderie.

“When you go into the first [festival], you never know if it’s going to be successful, and you always hope the next year is bigger,” says Mary Beth Martin, executive director of the Earl Scruggs Center. “But, then to be crossing this milestone of year five is pretty amazing — people are marking it on their calendar every year.”

Since its inception, the festival has showcased some of the biggest names in bluegrass and beyond: Alison Krauss & Union Station, Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, Tanya Tucker, Yonder Mountain String Band, The Wood Brothers, Peter Rowan, Old Crow Medicine Show, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, etc.

“Honestly, just the love that people have for the music and for the acts we’re bringing in is really touching and inspiring,” Martin says. “Because, at the same time, they also have that same love for Earl, and we’re continuing to put his legacy front and center.”

Friday afternoon. Heading backstage, I approach the green room trailer for The Earls of Leicester, a Grammy Award-winning bluegrass group that exclusively performs songs from the Flatt & Scruggs repertoire. Knocking on the door, dobro legend Jerry Douglas answers. As someone who personally knew Scruggs and spent decades getting to interact with the man himself, onstage and off, Douglas can’t help but be proud of what the festival is cultivating from both sides of the microphone.

“Every little niche of [Earl’s] musical life is being explored here,” Douglas says. “And, like Earl, the festival is doing [what he did] — staying open-minded and taking the music forward. There’s room for everybody, and we’re just pushing the envelope a little bit more.”

For Douglas, he remains in awe of Scruggs and the music he created.

“Every time I go away from it and come back to it and listen to it again, I’m amazed all over again that it even happened the first time,” Douglas notes. “And how a guy like him played this kind of music, and was able to push a whole band, a whole idiom that far.”

Before I exit the trailer, Douglas pulls an antique red bow tie out of his travel bag. Placing it on the table, he looks at it, then looks at me. “That was Cedric’s,” Douglas says.

“Cedric Rainwater?” I reply in amazement.

“Yep,” Douglas grins. “I’m letting our bass player wear it tonight.”

That evening, EOL bassist Daniel Kimbro is sporting the bow tie, this incredibly powerful symbol of Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts, a first-generation name etched into the bedrock of bluegrass, a musician who played bass in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, the “Original Bluegrass Band” when Monroe debuted his new sound alongside Scruggs in the mid-1940s. Watts would later become a member of Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys and Hank Williams’ Drifting Cowboys.

Right after the whirlwind performance ends, Kimbro walks sidestage and tracks down Douglas. He hands the tie back and thanks him for letting him wear it, if but for a moment. “Keep it, it looks good on you,” Douglas says with a smile. Kimbro is rendered speechless by the poignant gesture.

Following EOL was Béla Fleck, who closed out the Flint Hill Stage on Friday night with his project, My Bluegrass Heart, which has been the banjo wizard’s highly successful return to his musical roots in recent years.

“I didn’t know I was a banjo person. Then I heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo, and suddenly I was a banjo person. He was the spark, and he’s that for a lot of people,” Fleck says backstage. “Something about Earl has that sound that makes people go, ‘Well, I don’t know what that is, but I’ve got to hear more, and I’ve got to figure out what it is’ — he had that effect on me.”

Featuring a rotating cast of stellar musicians, Fleck presented fiddler Michael Cleveland, bassist Mark Schatz, guitarist Jake Stargel, Dobro player Jeff Partin, fiddler Maddie Denton and mandolinist Harry Clark (the latter two of East Nash Grass) to a raucous audience soaking it all in.

“The part of that [musical] language that all banjo players always come back to is Earl Scruggs,” Cleveland says. “It doesn’t matter what else I’m doing, I can always turn on Flatt & Scruggs and it’s like hearing it for the first time.”

The festival grounds also showcase an endless sea of bluegrass activities and educational opportunities to immerse oneself in the history and lore of not only the genre itself, but that of Western North Carolina, too. There were numerous musical workshops and live audience Q&A sessions with artists, and even the “Spirits of Bluegrass,” a cultural collaboration and tasting area sponsored by The Bluegrass Situation and featuring local/regional distillers.

Saturday evening. The Del McCoury Band is headlong into its Flint Hill Stage set. Nowadays regarded as the elder statesmen of bluegrass, the 87-year-old McCoury represents the finest in traditional sounds. He also remains this sponge of curiosity, this open-minded, kind heart and carefree, welcoming soul that mirrors the ethos of Scruggs in more ways than just the music.

“If I hadn’t heard Earl Scruggs when I did, I wouldn’t be playing today,” McCoury says in a humble tone. “There’s something that just struck me about him. He was a genius. All of those great banjo players learned from Earl.” (To note, although McCoury is well-known for his guitar playing, he originally started out in the bluegrass realm as a banjo picker.)

“High on a mountain oh, wind blowin’ free/Thinking about the days that used to be,” McCoury’s high, powerful tenor voice rings out, his signature tone ricocheting around the arena and across the nearby fields. “High on a mountain oh, standin’ all alone/Wondering where the years of my life has flown.”

Sitting sidestage watching McCoury intently was 19-year-old Murphy Campbell. Performing earlier in the day as part of the Blue Ridge Music Trails presentation, Campbell, a native of Western North Carolina, is a rising old-time banjo player/singer. For her, music is not only tradition, it’s life, and to see McCoury in all his glory was something she was grateful for, and inspired by.

“We all have this common goal of preservation, and to see people do it on such a large scale is deeply encouraging,” Campbell says. “I’m not used to stuff like this, it’s crazy to watch it from [sidestage]. I never thought that me playing the banjo would get me here to sit and watch [Del] play.”

As of late, Campbell is in the midst of recording new renditions of old ballads that were cherished and collected by her ancestors over a century ago in Mitchell and Yancey counties in North Carolina. Those tunes were cataloged in the book English Folk Songs from Southern Appalachia, with Campbell’s relatives writing down their ballads back in 1918, on a date that coincides with Campbell’s exact birthday.

“We’re all grasping onto something that has roots, because no one feels like they [have roots] anymore” Campbell says when asked about the massive revival in string music in recent years. “And they hold on hard, real hard.”

And when it comes to North Carolina musical roots, you’d be hard-pressed to find deeper ones than those of The Avett Brothers. Tying a bow on the weekend with the honors of playing the Sunday finale, the Avetts roared across the stage with their mesmerizing blend of Americana, bluegrass and folk stylings, the culmination of which being this incredibly vibrant tone of heart and soul.

“Three words that became hard to say/I, and love, and you,” Scott Avett howled to the heavens, an audience of thousands of joyous faces in the grandstands completely mesmerized and singing along to every single word. “What you were then, I am today/Look at the things I do.”

“Earl Scruggs used to be the model for a technique when I started [playing banjo],” Avett says. “And the more I learned about Earl, followed what he did, and paid close attention to his creativity, I realized he was a pioneer in more than just a technique, he was a pioneer in being an individual.”

For Avett, “being an individual” is a core value of the band’s ethos, and something that genuinely reverberates throughout the festival and the artists taking the stage. All of this circling back to Earl Scruggs and what it means to be original and authentic, whether it’s in reference to one’s music and art or simply the way one interacts with the world at-large — this deep, intrinsic sense of curiosity and camaraderie, passion and purpose.

“Doc [Watson] told us personally, ‘You’re on your path. Stay on your path. You’re not on Doc Watson’s path,’” Avett says. “Tom T. Hall told us the exact same thing, Willie Nelson would say the same thing now. I think Earl would say, ‘You guys need to do what you do,’ and we take that to heart.”

See photos from the Flint Hill Stage at the 2026 Earl Scruggs Music Festival.

All photos courtesy of Earl Scruggs Music Festival. Lead image of The Avett Brothers: Bain Stewart.

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

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.

30 Jamgrass Sitch Sessions

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

What do you mean this whole time we could have been the Jamgrass Situation!?

Ever since the earliest days of BGS we’ve been posting about bluegrass, hosting bluegrass shows, and shooting bluegrass Sitch Sessions. Our often-viral performance videos have been the bread and butter of the brand. Along the way, with our borderless and wide open “rootsy” purview, quite a bit of bluegrass “coloring outside the lines” has been celebrated on our site and jamgrass has permeated everything we’ve done. As the years went on, the influence of bluegrass’s current biggest phenomenon became more and more apparent on the site.

You can see this fact – obviously! – throughout our archive of Sitch Sessions. It’s quite the collection of first-rate jamgrass. Over more than 15 years we’ve had dozens of Sitch Sessions and YouTube videos feature some of the best and most beloved jamgrass acts around. One of our very first viral sensations was a now-retired clip of Billy Strings himself. But so many more have featured on our site and channels: Yonder Mountain String Band, The Lil Smokies, Elephant Revival, Front Country, Punch Brothers, Fruition, Greensky Bluegrass, Town Mountain, Mountain Grass Unit, Lindsay Lou, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, the Travelin’ McCourys, the Hillbenders – and many, many more.

From rooftops in downtown L.A. to Falkenberg, Sweden, to DelFest in Cumberland, Maryland, to the powdery slopes above Lake Tahoe to Telluride, Colorado, and back again. Across the trajectory of BGS over time, jamgrass has been an indelible through line of the work we do and the content we create. And we wouldn’t have it any other way!

To celebrate Jamgrass in July, enjoy exploring these 30 jamgrass Sitch Sessions. And dive into the archive here and here to see even more! Just for today, just for this month – let’s be the Jamgrass Situation.

“Take a Chance on Me” – Yonder Mountain String Band

We’ve gotten the chance to collaborate with Yonder Mountain String Band quite a bit over the years, but this Sitch Session has always been a highlight of our content together. YMSB have been carrying the jamgrass banner for a long time; they are stalwarts of the subgenre, for sure!

“Miss Marie” – The Lil Smokies

But why did the Lil Smokies have to retire!? We miss them so much already. If you miss them as much as we do, check out our final interview with the group posted in April 2025 on the heels of their excellent last album, Break Of The Tide.

“Cedarwood Pines” – The Brothers Comatose

Across the decades and generations you can always count on the Bay Area to produce excellent jamgrass. The Brothers Comatose certainly fit that descriptor! “Cedarwood Pines,” shot on a picturesque DTLA rooftop in 2017, features a classic lineup of the group and (gasp!) electric guitar!? (That’s how you know it’s jamgrass.)

“If Something Breaks” – Front Country

Speaking of Bay Area jamgrass – and bands we wish hadn’t retired! Front Country may be no more, but we’re glad we have our Sitch Session memories. And of course, the members of FroCo have gone on to do even more excellent things in roots music. For instance, have you heard BERTHA? Now there’s some jamgrass, too.

“Wasting Time” – Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats

Sometimes a band that isn’t a jamgrass band is a jamgrass band, you know what we mean? Now, are Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats always a jamgrass band? Perhaps no. But here, in our Sitch Session, or in many of their live, all-skate jam or festival or collaboration set contexts? Could be jamgrass… It’s always in the ear of the beholder, after all.

“Winter to Pry” – The Deer

That time we shot sessions at Old Settler’s in Austin, Texas, was one of the best. Such a great range of acts, sounds, and styles. The Deer turned out a perennial favorite Sitch Session for us, which we returned to time and time again as winter would roll in. The outdoor Austin shoot and the Deer’s offering of the song would always warm us up.

“All Day All Night” – River Whyless

If you miss River Whyless, worry not, this band hasn’t retired, they’ve just slowed down a bit and re-intentionalized their performing and touring rhythms. We once featured the group on our stage at Bonnaroo and while their sound always defied perfect categorization, here on “All Day All Night” and on festival stages – and elsewhere, to be sure – they often fit the jamgrass bill perfectly.

“Hey Boys” – The HillBenders

Recently the HillBenders have slightly shuffled their lineup, but the Missouri-based band are still one of the most party-ready groups on the bluegrass and jamgrass scenes. Their work with Keller Williams and Tommy: A Bluegrass Opry are the jammiest of their offerings, but the threads and vibes of jams and jamgrass are woven throughout their work.

“Home In Your Heart” – Elephant Revival

One of our coolest Sitch Session locations ever! Out in the desert in Pioneertown, California, with Elephant Revival. This has always been such a memorable one. Here’s another group we greatly miss.

“Dance You Hippy Dance” – Tim O’Brien

What do you call a forefather who’s also a currentfather? That’s what Tim O’Brien is to jamgrass, a foundational figure who’s also active in the music and in moving it forward. And what would jamgrass be without dancing hippies? Nothing! It would be nothing!

“Burn Them” – Greensky Bluegrass

One of our most-viewed Sitch Sessions of all time, and it’s no wonder. Greensky Bluegrass epitomize the ethos of jamgrass – community, longevity, collaboration, and of course, jams. Every time we collaborated with Mason Jar Music, who produced this session, the results would be stellar. With 1.5 million views and counting… jamgrass is where it’s at.

“Death Comes Knockin’” – Fruition

When bands and performers would route through Los Angeles, we often jumped at the chance to link up and capture some content. In 2016, we met up with Fruition in Echo Park to shoot “Death Comes Knockin’” a rocking, macabre song that’s as old-timey as it is jammy. Fruition have always been good at infusing the traditional into their progressive sounds. An essential band of the modern jamgrass movement.

“My Oh My / Boll Weevil” – Punch Brothers

Okay, now just because they can also play classical doesn’t mean Punch Brothers aren’t a jamgrass band! It’s bluegrass, it’s jam band, it’s jamgrass. I mean, you can’t be a string band playing that many Radiohead covers and not be considered jamgrass, right? Right.

“Coming Back To You” – Town Mountain

North Carolina has birthed some high-quality jamgrass over the years. Another band we’d wish out of retirement if we could, Town Mountain combined jam band appeal with country twang and bluegrass drive (and silliness, too). They were jamgrass even before they added a drum kit and a pedal steel, but towards the end of their tenure there they seemed to creep ever closer to the jammy center.

“One Horse Town” – Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper Featuring Charlie Starr

Fiddling phenom Michael Cleveland is as traditional as they get, but whether in his work with Jason Carter or his many jaw-dropping features – with Béla Fleck, or Billy Strings, or Tommy Emmanuel, or whomever – he’s known to shred his way through some jamgrass, too. Partnering here with Charlie Starr of Southern rock group Blackberry Smoke, Cleveland and his band Flamekeeper are remarkably jamgrass.

“Billy in the Lowground” – Kenny G, Ed Helms, Bryan Sutton, and Gabe Witcher

A virtual jam for pandemic times creates virtual jamgrass of the highest – and most random – sort! One of our crowning achievements across the history of BGS will be getting Kenny G in on a COVID benefit bluegrass jam. For Whiskey Sour Happy Hour, our pandemic-era virtual variety show, the sensational wind specialist performed “Billy in the Lowground” with Bryan Sutton, Gabe Witcher, and our co-founder Ed Helms. ICONIC. If Kenny G is playing bluegrass, it’s gotta be jamgrass.

“Turn Around” – Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams

Calling Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams “jamgrass artists” would be woefully reductive and simplistic. Still, it wouldn’t be right to exclude them from this list. Across their varied and diverse careers they’ve collaborated, recorded, and performed with some absolutely seminal figures in Americana, jam band, and bluegrass. Here, we caught up with the duo while sailing aboard our favorite roots music cruise, Cayamo.

“How Many Times” – Rainbow Girls

Something about Rainbow Girls is just a perfect fit for a jamgrass playlist – and we don’t just mean the rainbows. Also captured aboard a Cayamo voyage, this Bob Marley cover by the Bay Area-bwased folk group encapsulates so many of the facets that we love about jamgrass, from the material to the joy they bring forth in the music to their humor and community mindset.

“House of the Rising Sun” – Peter Rowan, Sam Bush, and Friends

There wouldn’t be no jamgrass without these fellas! At MerleFest last year Sam Bush hosted the iconic Late Night Jam and there were quite a few Late Night-jamgrassy moments. Whenever jamgrass gets to the point of having its own canon of recognizable material, like bluegrass, old-time, jazz, and others, “House of the Rising Sun” will surely be found among those songs. Absolutely nonnegotiable.

“Takes So Long, Goes So Fast” – Lindsay Lou

Decked out in snow gear, in a gondola above Lake Tahoe, with a bunch of hippies and wooks and music fans at WinterWonderGrass? Yep, that might be jamgrass. Lindsay Lou has become a stalwart in the younger jamgrass generations, and certainly not just because of her many connections to Billy Strings. As a performer herself or a collaborator or artist at large, she’s a favorite at jamgrass festivals and events.

“Fishin’ in the Dark” – AJ Lee & Blue Summit

Jamgrass filtering down through the generations! A fantastic up-and-coming bluegrass band, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, offer their rendition of a jamgrass classic first recorded by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Who are Nitty Gritty if not a jamgrass outfit? While AJ Lee and band are much more than “just” jamgrass, they fit that moniker oh so well. This Sierragrass Sitch Session has been a fan favorite.

“Lonesome Dove” – Mountain Grass Unit

Shouldering the jamgrass mantle for Gen Z, Mountain Grass Unit have jammed with everyone from Billy Strings to Kesha to Shania Twain. These fellas are making a name for themselves right at the very center of the jamgrass universe, but while still carving out their own sound and their own identity. An exciting act to be watching and following along with at this juncture, their new album is set for release in late August.

“The Missing Stair” – Big Richard

You know what’s a prerequisite for being or becoming a jamgrass band? Big Richard energy. This group of supremely talented women have got it. We’d love to see them on more jam band and jamgrass festival lineups – a welcome palate cleanser, indeed.

“Fiery Gizzard” – the Travelin’ McCourys

Del McCoury Band have been known to dip a toe in the jamgrass waters regularly, but when the boys are “released” from their duties with their father and bandleader and go out as the Travelin’ McCourys is when they really lean into the jams. Their live shows are some of the highest quality jamgrass out there, the most elite bluegrass virtuosity lent to the jammiest, rip-roaringest tunes and songs.

“The Road Is a River” – Jim Lauderdale

Country’s modern renaissance man Jim Lauderdale is oh-so-many things – and jamgrass is one of them. With Lillie Mae and Frank Rische at his side, that seems especially true in this Rootsy Summer Session shot in Sweden. With as much tai chi as Lauderdale does, of course he belongs on this list!

“High Country” – Leftover Salmon

Leftover Salmon are one of THE most important and impactful artisan purveyors of jamgrass around. We were lucky to finally get a Sitch Session with the group a few years ago at WinterWonderGrass in Colorado. WWG is one of the best jamgrass assemblages around these days, and the festival just announced BajaWonderGrass in Mexico for April 2027.

“Weight of the World” – Clay Street Unit

Another group on the cutting edge of jamgrass and actively building its future is Clay Street Unit. Born out of the fertile jamgrass territories surrounding Denver, Colorado, the band just released their debut album earlier this year. So there’s still ample opportunity to get in on the “ground floor” of a group that is certainly going places.

“These Chickens Eat Fascists” – Pixie & the Partygrass Boys

We’d like to thank Pixie & the Partygrass Boys for representing anti-fascism in jamgrass. It’s an important beat and we need more folks giving us such a hilarious point of solidarity as “These Chickens Eat Fascists.” Two things jamgrass is always going to be: open and accepting of everyone, and a goddamn party!

“Not Quite Spring” – Kyle Tuttle

A premier banjoist in jamgrass, Kyle Tuttle has performed with so many greats in the subgenre, from Jeff Austin and Molly Tuttle to Lindsay Lou to Leftover Salmon – and many, many more. His own solo albums and solo shows (which are, gratefully, becoming more and more frequent) are jamgrassy top-to-bottom. If you’re lucky, catch him at Bluegrass Mondays at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Nashville these days, where he’s often holding court with impeccable bands backing him up.

“Islands In the Stream” – Love Canon

A jamgrass tributary in the mighty jamgrass river coursing towards the roiling jamgrass sea is cover songs from outside of bluegrass and roots music altogether. Ever since the Earl Scruggs Revue, New Grass Revival, and others in the earliest days, this has been an important plank in the jamgrass platform. Love Canon are one of the bands who did it best, offering bluegrassified versions of absolute bangers – like “Islands In the Stream,” here featuring Lauren Balthrop on vocals.

Lead Image: AJ Lee & Blue Summit

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.

The Steel Wheels’ Songs for Humans, by Humans

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s common these days to wring hands over the many ways powerful tech companies have meddled, without permission, in how we discover and listen to music (among other things). It’s just as common to fearfully declare that music’s good old days are past and gone. But after 20 years as a working band, we know that the strength of community through music is much more enduring; and we see it all the time.

There is no greater force than a group of people who are ready to share a joyful experience. It doesn’t matter if they’re gathering to jam, attend a concert, or anything else. People in community can create strong connections in a heartbeat, under almost any circumstances, and music is a powerful vehicle for it. Some days it feels harder than others to find that spark, but it’s always there if we come together and dig for it. Every day the pressure grows to strip the things we all have made and love for parts, but collectively we can raise our voices and push back. As a band, we’re choosing to resist that force and to keep building things. Together.

This playlist features artists that we feel musical and professional kinship with, bands that have been around and are well into their careers. The songs we chose come from albums that are worth spending time with over and over again. These folks have played lots and lots of gigs and revel in the energy of a great show as much as we do. You’ll also find some music from our 9th studio album, The Steel Wheels, too. Music that we made together in a room. – The Steel Wheels

“Easy” – The Steel Wheels

A breezy song with a swirling fiddle intro and a big question at its heart. We live in the future now, with the entire world available to us on the other side of our screens. So why are we lonelier than ever? If everything is supposed to be easy, why does it all feel so hard?

“Talk Is Cheap” – Dr. Dog

Because they inspired me with one incredible Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion set probably 15 years ago. Their old amps, their confident trailblazing of their sound that was clearly referential and respectful – but not chasing what a lot of other bands were chasing.

“Los Angeles” – Big Thief

An artist’s job is to remain open and soft to the world and to distill all that pain and joy into work that transmits emotion across space and time. Somehow, Big Thief seems to only become less jaded with time, maintaining curiosity and exploration as part of their creative process.

“Go Back” – The Steel Wheels

All deep relationships come with joy and with pain. To be rid of one you would also lose the other. It’s part of lived experience, this is a reminder to embrace all of it. True connection is worth it.

“Waiting For The Sun” – The Jayhawks

The Jayhawks are a band that prove you can continue to forge your own way and make it through the highs and lows. I was still really just a kid when I discovered them through some older cats I was playing with at the time. Son Volt and Wilco were very much in the alt-country scene and the Jayhawks just had something a bit different going on.

“Worried About The Weather” – Greensky Bluegrass

I love the way this song pivots between the anxiety of pushing forward through uncertainty and the breezy delight of taking a moment to enjoy the journey. There’s momentum to both things and “Weather” has tons of it.

“Keep On Dancing” – The Steel Wheels

Let’s take a break from responsibilities to just see ourselves and each other. Don’t forget to breathe and to appreciate the unadorned peace that can fill the spaces between us.

“I And Love And You” – The Avett Brothers

Even a track like this, one full of solitary stillness, shows the Avetts’ songs are packed with other people. They always remind me that I’m not as alone as I often feel. You can sense the presence of old partners and family throughout this song even though the speaker is alone in their car.

“Valerie” – The Brothers Comatose

These guys are everybody’s friends. Maybe the acoustic Dawes? I don’t know. We’ve known them a long time and they keep bringing joy and fun with warmth and grounded songs that don’t rely too heavily on bluegrass tropes.

“Sway / Endless Highway (Pt. 2)” – Watchhouse

Watchhouse invest deep thought into every lyric and intention into every note without ever seeming to overthink their process or get held back by previous work. “Sway / Endless Highway (Pt. 2)” demonstrates how the band is constantly in conversation, transitioning between tempos and driving down into a deep groove with a breeziness that belies the technical mastery of their acoustic instruments. At a Watchhouse show, the crowd will hang on every note and every silence, sharing a reverence for the song with the band.

“Slow Rise (to the middle)” – The Wood Brothers

Oliver, Chris, and Jano seem to be propelled forward by some groove force that penetrates everything they do and they invite listeners to join in on the funky joy. Their track “Slow Rise (to the middle)” tips a hat to their musical journey. To be in an audience is to get lost in the moment, only to occasionally remind yourself how wild it is that all the sounds coming from the stage emanate from just three musicians.

“Way Down Yonder ” – Chatham County Line

I first heard Chatham County Line when I opened for them at The Livery in Benton Harbor, Michigan, with a jamgrass band I was in, probably 20 years ago. They were tight and had their act together. I was blown away by their professionalism and it made a big impact on me. I will never forget that moment and I’m still inspired by their creativity and longevity as a band.

Photo Credit: Monik Geisel

An Oral History of the Infamous Stringdusters

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CP: The Plough and Stars! Andy was playing–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AH: I think that would’ve been 2005.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CP: Ben Eldridge.

AH: Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CP: Critter introduced us.

AF: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

CP: Also, we were into that stuff.

AH: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Daniel Milchev

25 Years of Greensky Bluegrass Connecting the Dots

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On a recent afternoon, Paul Hoffman is standing in a parking lot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Lead singer/mandolinist for Greensky Bluegrass, Hoffman is pacing around the backstage lot before the gig at XL Live that evening deep in reflection about questions posed over the phone – the core of which focus on the upcoming 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking jamgrass outfit. A while back, in the depths of rural New Hampshire, I interviewed Hoffman for another project and I asked him just what the original intent was behind Greensky Bluegrass.

“To play heavy metal music on acoustic instruments,” he replied, a sly grin emerging across his face.

Now, 25 years since its inception, Greensky Bluegrass has adhered directly to Hoffman’s sentiments. These days, the group has become a marquee live act, one which uses its string instruments to transcend all genres of music, whether bluegrass or blues, rock or country, funk or soul – or even heavy metal.

Case-in-point, the ensemble’s latest album, XXV, is not only an ode to a quarter-century of passion, purpose, and performance, but also a mile marker by which Greensky Bluegrass can measure their own road to the “here and now” – this realm where the passage of time doesn’t necessarily matter, only fleeting moments onstage with the ones you love do.

XXV brings together many of those dear friends and collaborators of Greensky – Sam Bush, Billy Strings, Lindsay Lou, Nathaniel Rateliff, Aoife O’Donovan, Holly Bowling, Ivan Neville, Natalie Cressman, and Jennifer Hartswick. Each of these special guests represent chapters of the band’s continued journey to something – somewhere, anywhere – that kind and curious folks congregate in the name of fellowship, compassion, and sonic joy.

With the starting line of Greensky Bluegrass being an impromptu Halloween gig in 2000 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, other pivotal dots pop up quickly along the way. Like the inevitable camaraderie between the group and other Michigan artists like Strings and Lou, who came up in the same scene and have supported each other ever since. Or, like Sam Bush himself – Bluegrass Hall of Famer and the symbolic face of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival – being featured on the project, reminding how the Telluride stage brought Greensky Bluegrass into the national spotlight when they won its famed band contest in 2006.

For Greensky, the friendships made along the way brought endless opportunities to play alongside one another at a show, a festival, or late-night jam. Opportunities that would always be too good to pass up – don’t forget, fun is the original point, and should remain so.

XXV is also a fresh snapshot of Greensky Bluegrass. The songs are pulled from across the entire timeline of the outfit, from their early days in Kalamazoo to the mountains of Colorado. From the bright lights of Nashville to the backroads of Southern Appalachia. From the blue skies of Anytown, U.S.A., to the sandy beaches of some international destination.

After 25 years, what remains is a band of genuine souls where gratitude is only matched by hunger and curiosity for what resides just around the next corner. Greensky Bluegrass, decades later, remain ready to surprise the listener and to carry on the pure intent that emerged those many years ago.

Now that this album’s coming out, whether consciously or subconsciously, the celebration of 25 years is currently underway. What’s been kind of rolling through your mind?

Hoffman: Primarily gratitude. I’d be remiss to not be grateful that we’ve been able to [do this for 25 years]. It’s a celebration, truly. It feels so cool. We’re doing [the anniversary shows] in our hometown and playing the [Wings Event Center in Kalamazoo] for the first time, which we’ve talked about since we were a very young band. And, you know, something interesting I’ve learned is how excited people are about this retrospective project. In true Greensky fashion, it’s this unique, hybrid idea. Like, “What if we did this? What if it took this turn? What if we recorded this and revamped this?”

We didn’t just make a new record, we stopped to reflect and commemorate in a way that was meaningful to us. And it seems like it’s translating. It’s not even out yet. It’s a unique perspective on gratitude that maybe I didn’t expect. [For XXV], I don’t want to say that it was easy or something. Because we did it pretty quickly and we didn’t have to write any material and we didn’t have to make huge choices about how to present it, because there already is an arrangement and an idea. But, in some cases, we did things differently because we could and we were not beholden to some authority on how it needs to go.

[The recording process] was so casual and creative in this really innocent way – “Let’s just record this and see what happens.” And we just kept recording stuff. We didn’t even know what we were going to do next. Every moment is monumental in some way or another, but 25 years is nothing to scoff at. And this all was birthed from, “What could we do?” With making new music and new albums, there’s a pressure to create something better than we’ve ever done. Or genuine to the brand we’ve created and to ourselves, but also exploratory enough [and] a departure from the norm enough that it’s new and exciting. It feels like such a relief to do [XXV], to approach creating new material from a different perspective.

How did you decide on the guests?

I wanted to find guests that celebrate our story, that are close to us and collaborators and such, but also elevated the material in some meaningful way. And there were real pleasant surprises along the way there.

What did it mean to have Billy and Lindsay on the record, seeing as all of you emerged from the same scene in Kalamazoo and have always supported each other?

I mean, to say that it was sort of obvious and natural is probably an understatement. We joked about why we chose “Reverend,” because Billy plays it [live]. But, I also feel it’s an important song. And for me as a writer, it’s kind of a landmark in my journey as a creative. But again, even though I knew [Billy] would crush it on the guitar solo, some of the phrasing choices he makes are subtly different than mine – I love it. And, man, I can’t stress enough, what a gift [“Reverend” is]. I wrote that song almost 20 years ago. It means something different to me now, and it has throughout my life singing that song.

You’ve always been a very sonically elusive band. Was that by design or just how things evolved?

I think that we just have a spirit to not be limited. 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. And we think we’ve jumped the shark many times. [Laughs]

With getting older, you also start having different perspectives on what you were creating and how you want to present it.

Yeah. You know, art is timeless in some ways, because you can change your opinion about it or the way you relate to it as you mature.

When you had mentioned that you guys “jumped the shark many times,” I think that’s one of the things I appreciate about Greensky – you’re not afraid to just take a leap.

It’s one of my favorite things about musicians I admire, too, are the ones that I watch struggle to either challenge themselves, push themselves, push their boundaries, or convey a message with emotion that’s challenging, you know? If you’re willing to make a mistake, if you’re willing to truly find the line of your capacity, you have to be willing to cross it to know where it is. I’ve always said – in my later maturity – that I wonder if I’ve crossed it too many times, and in sort of a noble quest with noble intentions. [Laughs]

That’s something I love about Billy’s playing a lot. Despite being one of the greatest guitar players I’ve ever seen, I’ve watched him up there grasping for things and struggling. Struggle doesn’t always have to have a negative [connotation]. To not struggle would be complicit and boring.

The upcoming Halloween shows in Kalamazoo are the official 25th anniversary of when the stars aligned, when you, Mike [Bont], and Dave [Bruzza] played together as Greensky for the first time.

When you started asking the question, my brain went to right about now, [25 years ago]. We met [a few] weeks before Halloween. I was a college freshman and I went to this bar called the Blue Dolphin, where there was a bluegrass open mic. I saw Dave and Bont play and approached them after the thing and was like, “Hey, I just bought a mandolin,” that I’d gotten in late August before moving to college. So, I’d only had it for four or five weeks.

I didn’t know what the hell I was doing at all or what bluegrass even was. I bought the mandolin because of David Grisman, who’s so bluegrass-adjacent that I didn’t know who Bill Monroe was. I knew “Shady Grove.” [All of] which is still just a remarkable thing for me to think about. Like, what hell would my life have been had I not made that choice [to play mandolin]? What a bizarre twist of fate and then here we are 25 years later.

So, you guys met and you said, “Let’s jam”?

Yeah. A couple days later, I showed up at Bont’s house for a rehearsal. Him and Dave would just get together and pick. They were both learning bluegrass. Everything was so casual and just for fun. They would have band practices where we would get together and learn songs and stuff. And I just showed up for the next one and then didn’t go away.

What was the name of that [open mic] band?

Greensky Bluegrass. They were already playing as Greensky Bluegrass, which was named by a friend of Dave’s that played mandolin with him a little bit for fun. It was a joke in jest, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have a bluegrass band named Greensky Bluegrass?”

I don’t think I ever knew that you guys were called Greensky before the official [2000] Halloween show.

Well, I mean, what is “official” is interesting to think about. They were already [Greensky]. It wasn’t their first open mic, either. So, the first time the three of us [“officially”] played was the Halloween show. But, I think I joined them at open mics for a week or two or something [before Halloween]. And Halloween was a party. There was a poster made for fun or something. We were on the bill. Dave was in another band called Seeds & Stems. It was a house party in a house that Dave lived in. [Laughs] A pretty wild party, if I may say so.

So, it was billed as Greensky Bluegrass?

“Billed” is still kind of generous. But, yeah, we played a set in the basement and in the living room. I think the living room upstairs was just acoustic and then the jam band played downstairs in the basement, like colleges do, you know? A couple days later, we played a show at a venue in town, Club Soda in Kalamazoo, that was kind of a legendary rock club through the ‘90s and stuff. It was small, but we played there on a triple bill November 5 or something, [just] days later. And that one, I [still] have the poster. I think that was our first paid show.

Were you doing covers or did [Dave and Mike] have originals, too?

They were playing just bluegrass standards for the most part. It’s funny, that [first] night [I met] Dave, he gave me CDs – Seldom Scene, Live at The Cellar Door, a Rounder Records bluegrass compilation, and a Bill Monroe live show. And [he] was like, “Listen to these. See you on Tuesday at Bont’s house.”

In hindsight, man, to be 18 and have that kind of freedom, you know what I mean? I’ve been recently jamming on electric guitar at my house by myself for fun. And I’ve been thinking, “I wonder if I could find some dads around to start a band with for just fun.” And that experience is so foreign to me now, because I’m so immersed in this thing that’s become my life.

Looking back on it, you kind of jumped into the deep end pretty quickly.

I didn’t take a mandolin lesson until COVID. [Laughs] I was self-taught, because I already knew how to play the guitar – “knew how to,” I use that a little loosely, too. Took some [music theory] classes in high school and college and I’m sort of classically trained. But, I was able to teach myself my own instrument for a really long time. I should have sooner harnessed the strength of learning from another, because when I took a lesson during COVID from a friend, I was like, “I should’ve done this a lot sooner.” [Laughs]

You know, so much of what I was learning in those early days was how to express myself as a writer and find my voice. That stuff always superseded my need for technical prowess. I think we all kind of share that sentiment, all five of us – how to present this passion piece is more important than how to do it. We took on this every-other-week gig and stuff like that [in Kalamazoo]. And the commitment to go play shows for the same crowd every other week inspired us to grow, because we needed to. We had that jam band sensibility of satiating the fans. What can we do next week that’ll keep people excited? What can we do that’s new? How can we make this better?

When you look back, you can see where the dots connect. But, when it’s happening in real time, you don’t realize what the domino effect is, where all of a sudden you’ve found yourself in this band that you’re still in 25 years later.

Yeah. I was 18 [when we started the band]. I’ve lived with Dave and Bont for 25 years of my life. I didn’t even live with my parents that long. [Laughs] I’ve spent 200+ days of [every] year of my life with those two guys for 25 years, and the other ones for many years, as well. It’s kind of wild. It’s so cool that we created this project, [which has become] just a celebration of our relationship and that’s so much more important than what it has become. We care about each other and we genuinely have a lot of aligned goals, artistically and personally. We’re still grinding for it, and I’m grateful for what we have.

I think we’ve been very successful. I feel less “grinding” now and more, “Let’s just go and have some fun and play some shows.” Play where people want us to play and not measure our success by how many tickets we sell. And I’m starting to learn that more now. It took 25 years for me to figure out that what we have is great. We’ve got something cool, let’s just keep doing it.

And that’s got to be a nice place to get to, because you don’t get to 25 years by accident. The fact the original three members are still there is amazing, because that story is not that common in the grand scheme of things in this industry.

Even in our culture. It’s not even [common] in business partnerships, families, friendships. And the reality of that – that I’m learning with age – is that relationships change and everything shouldn’t be measured by the testament of time. I want to find value in a moment that is for the sake of “now” and not some transactional [thing]. Like, if I’m nice to you “now,” then we’ll have this friendship that serves us both and we’ll be there for each other. All that kind of stuff is great, but I want to live in the moment.

I think what’s remarkable is that we’ve stayed together, because we’ve all grown and changed in similar ways and our journeys have aligned the whole time, or for the most of the time. We’ve veered away from each other and back to each other many times. But, when one of us has wanted something different, we’ve all kind of shared that desire. In a way, we’ve been able to all be very sincere to ourselves and grow and change together.

I don’t mean to speculate what other bands are like or anything like that, but I don’t have a lot of relationships in my life that have lasted this long. And not just people, but to things like food or activities I enjoy. The only thing maybe is the way I’ve worn my hair for 30 years. [Laughs] When we grow, our tastes change for all things. But, my [creative, intrinsic] tastes for these four other men have not changed.

Continue to explore our Artist of the Month content on Greensky Bluegrass here.

Photo Credit: Dylan Langille

Artist of the Month:
Greensky Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Dylan Langille