Episode 324: It’s hard to believe that Nashville’s SteelDrivers have been making their unique brand of hard-core string band music for nearly twenty years. They were the vehicle through which many of us were introduced to the epic voice of Chris Stapleton, back when he and Mike Henderson co-wrote that band’s high impact debut album of 2008. When Henderson and Stapleton had to move on, the band pulled its greatest trick, bringing on great new voices, growing bigger, and building a legacy that’s l...
Jun 24, 2025•59 min
Special Episode: The story of how global banjo explorer Joe Troop (formerly of Che Apalache) met Venezuelan harpist and all-around folk music master Larry Bellorín is testimony to the magic of global culture and a cautionary tale about the stark turn US policy has taken against working asylum seekers this year. Over three years as the bilingual, genre-fusing, and multi-instrumental duo Larry & Joe, they’ve toured widely and made two albums together to great acclaim among folk music lovers. T...
Jun 20, 2025•41 min
Episode 323: This episode of The String is a field report from the city that raised me in the 1970s and 80s and gave me my foundation in music, from college rock radio, to youth orchestra at Duke University, to jazz tutelage at a Black Muslim community center. It’s an arts-forward city that in the past decade has become something of a magnet for roots music, building on a history of gospel, blues and string band music, while Biscuits & Banjos, the new festival conceived by Rhiannon Giddens, ...
Jun 04, 2025•59 min
Episode 322: Texas songwriter Vincent Neil Emerson graduated from playing on the streets and in the bars of Fort Worth to tours with Colter Wall and American Aquarium and then a well-received debut album (2019’s Fried Chicken And Evil Women ). That inspired none other than Rodney Crowell and Shooter Jennings in turn to take an interest in producing the young country troubadour, resulting in a self-titled release in 2021 and the more recent The Golden Crystal Kingdom of 2023. They heard what I he...
May 26, 2025•59 min
Episode 321: Atlanta native Kristina Murray moved to Nashville in 2014 with a fresh and original debut album and steely determination. The country singer and songwriter carved out a respected space at honky tonks like Santa’s Pub and the American Legion. When hard work and critical acclaim for her two releases didn’t launch her career to a new orbit, it felt like defeat. That, plus the pandemic, fueled some challenging times and emotions that inspired her new one, Little Blue, a lovely, lament-f...
May 15, 2025•59 min
Episode 320: JD Clayton is one of the first emerging artists to release music in an era of new leadership at the historic Rounder Records in Nashville. He’s an open-hearted guy who got the songwriting bug growing up in Fort Smith, AR and who then found his songs and his way on stage led to organic growth. His 2023 album Long Way From Home got him out on the road in a big way and led to some high profile opening shows. He produced his new album Blue Sky Sundays, a fresh and catchy take on country...
May 12, 2025•59 min
Episode 319: This week’s split episode looks at songwriting and musicianship from two very different points of view. Toronto’s Jeremie Albino is a powerful roots rock singer/writer whose early love of blues and old rock and roll comes through in his self-effacing, easy grooving songs. A call from Dan Auerbach opened up new avenues for him through the production of his late 2024 album ‘Our Time In The Sun’. Champion guitarist Tyler Grant writes his material more about stories from the history and...
Apr 30, 2025•59 min
Episode 318: Over a 15-year career that began in Boston’s jazz and old-time scene, Nashville-based Miss Tess has distinguished herself with a hybrid blend of contemporary songwriting and vintage, swinging Americana. On her newest, the widely traveled artist taps a long love affair with Cajun country in Louisiana, yet it’s her own blend rather than a traditional homage. Our conversation spans her upbringing in Maryland, her passion for early blues and jazz, her fascinating musical relationships a...
Apr 18, 2025•59 min
Episode 317: As the new year dawned, the first emerging artist that started buzzing on our radar was a California native living in Nashville with an emotional country-noir debut album called Silver Rounds. She was Olivia Wolf, and now months later, her album has proven its staying power, with critical acclaim and a long run on the Americana chart. She’s no youngster, so our conversation dives into her background and her long, patient journey to fully committing herself as a songwriter/artist. Th...
Apr 15, 2025•59 min
Episode 316: Sean McConnell was born to do this. His parents were working songwriters who helped him get started as a teen in Atlanta. He landed a long-term song publishing deal while still in school at MTSU and earned cuts by Tim McGraw, Martina McBride, Brett Young, and the TV show Nashville. Over 15 recordings - his latest is the lovely and agonizingly honest Skin - McConnell has become a beloved troubadour on the indie folk circuit and an honorary red dirt Texas poet through extensive tourin...
Apr 02, 2025•59 min
Episode 315: Adam Wright is one of the most thoughtful wordsmiths in the Nashville songwriting community, one who’s seen all sides of the Music Row machine. Working for a dozen years with Carnival Music, he’s carved a niche for himself, scoring a couple of Grammy Award nominations and landing cuts by Lee Ann Womack, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Brandy Clark and Bruce Robison, among others. When he sets aside time to write songs purely for himself as an artist, remarkable things happen, and now he...
Mar 21, 2025•59 min
Episode 314: The Devil Makes Three has been one of roots music’s outstanding if quiet success stories of the past twenty years. Formed in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001, they got out ahead of the O Brother phenomenon and built a unique, crowd-pleasing sound through a renegade admixture of early blues, hard country, gospel and punk rock. In this hour, founding singer and songwriter Pete Bernhard reflects on a career that’s surprised him and, after a season of personal loss, the cathartic process behind t...
Mar 13, 2025•58 min
Episoded 313: Sierra Hull brings a measure of small-town delight and innocence to roots and bluegrass that perfectly compliments her innate gifts and her formal schooling in high level music-making. The mandolinist, songwriter, singer, and band leader has emerged, since her youthful debut in 2008, as a star of her field and an inspiring figure in Americana. Her four IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards are part of the story. But so is her composing, her collaborating and her records. The firs...
Feb 28, 2025•59 min
Episode 312: In one of the big surprise stories in roots music of the past six months, bluegrass star and IIIrd Tyme Out founder Russell Moore was named the newest member of Alison Krauss and Union Station, taking over the male vocal and guitar role held by Dan Tyminski for years. Moore is on the upcoming album Arcadia and set to go on extensive tours in 2025 and ‘26. It’s a big move for this fan favorite. Moore got his start with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver in the 80s and then started his own ...
Feb 19, 2025•59 min
Epidode 311: When I met lifelong musician Red Young on board Delbert McClinton’s Sandy Beaches Cruise, I knew I had to interview him. He’s had one of those journeyman’s careers that ties together all the threads of American music, from pop to R&B to jazz. He’s a pianist, Hammond organ specialist, singer, arranger and producer, and at 76 years old, he’s seen it all. He’s worked with Kinky Friedman, Joan Armatrading, Dolly Parton, Sonny & Cher, Linda Ronstadt, Eric Burdon of the Animals, M...
Feb 13, 2025•59 min
Episode 310: It would be hard to name any songwriter in Nashville’s long history whose work has been recorded by more stars across more genres of music than Gary Nicholson. The Texas native came to Nashville in 1980 after stints in Ft. Worth and Los Angeles, and not only did he amass an impressive string of country music hits with Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, and more, he became Music City’s go-to soul and R&B man, conjuring songs for Bonnie Raitt, Etta James, BB King, The Fabulous Thunderbir...
Feb 06, 2025•59 min
Episode 309: Sam Grisman, the 35-year-old son of mandolin icon David “Dawg” Grisman, grew up in a unique and supercharged musical environment, to put it mildly. Jerry Garcia was coming over all the time to the family home to pick and record old-time folk music with the elder Grisman. Bluegrass legends came and went, rehearsing and recording, and giving Sam something to aspire to when he picked up the bass as a little kid. After a decade working and touring as sideman, he’s now based in Nashville...
Jan 31, 2025•59 min
Episode 308: For country singer Kaitlin Butts, 2023 was very good and 2024 was even better, with an Americana Award nomination, praise in Rolling Stone magazine, and festival dates she’d been dreaming of. Her reputation and acclaim grew on the strength of her feisty stage temperament, her bold and cutting voice, and her fearless songs. Raised in Oklahoma on theater and country music, the iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set in her state became a touchstone. Years later, she’d take the bold...
Jan 28, 2025•59 min
Episode 307: It was 50 years ago this month that a 23-year-old Mickey Raphael felt his way through his first recording session with his relatively new band boss Willie Nelson. And it was no small thing, producing the iconic Red Headed Stranger. It was one event in a charmed life that set this Dallas musician on a path to the ultimate steady gig for more than 50 years, plus stature as the world’s top on-call harmonica player. Raphael has played and recorded with Merle Haggard, Leon Russell, Don W...
Jan 22, 2025•59 min
Episode 306: This one’s personal. Eight years ago, when we launched the Roots Radio format on the historic signal WMOT 89.5 FM, a few of us knew we could have no better program director than Jessie Scott, and we were fortunate that she was in the right time and place to come on board. Her 50 years of on-air experience, her expertise in Americana music, and her warm and knowledgeable voice have become the core of WMOT’s sound. She governs the deep and excellent WMOT playlist and its mix of new an...
Jan 06, 2025•59 min
Episode 305: Traditional acoustic blues has seen one of its periodic revivals, with more younger African American artists involved than any time I can remember. No survey of the scene would be legit without sizing up the career of 35-year-old Jerron Paxton, sometimes known as “Blind Boy” for a severe myopia that’s affected his life since his teens. We should be grateful he’s committed to music - as a revivalist of the old and a writer of the new in a range of styles from Delta to ragtime to stri...
Dec 31, 2024•59 min
Episode 304: One of my highlights of 2024 was finally getting to see Minneapolis folk rocker Humbird, an artist whose three recordings display an unusual degree of sonic imagination and bandcraft, even beyond her serene and appealing voice. On her newest, Right On, songwriter Siri Undlin conjures ghosts, protests monoculture and environmental neglect, and investigates relationships. In this conversation, taped the morning after her official showcase at Americanafest 2024, we talk about her passi...
Dec 12, 2024•59 min
Episode 303: “I like dark songs. I don't know why,” says Grayson Capps early on in our interview. “Cheerful songs don't do much for me.” The Lower Alabama bluesman and songwriter is talking about both his career in general and his seventh album in particular, with the un-cheerful title Heartbreak, Misery & Death . It’s a covers collection featuring songs that shaped him as a young guy coming of age in Brewton, AL and New Orleans, where he went to school and launched his music career. It coul...
Dec 06, 2024•59 min
Episode 302: Joe Boyd is one of the most accomplished and eclectic record producers in the story of popular music. As an American living in London, he helped break psychedelic folk rock pioneers The Incredible String Band and worked with Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention. He founded Hannibal Records, giving a home to the solo career of Richard Thompson. He’s also worked with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Toumani Diabate, Geoff and Maria Muldauer, and many more. He was also part of the ...
Nov 19, 2024•58 min
Episode 301: Americana music has been most conspicuously represented in the last few years by songwriting, band-leading artists, including Jason Isbell, Sierra Ferrell, and Billy Strings. Flash back to the origins of the alt-country and Americana movement, and the conversation was more often about bands, such as Son Volt, Whiskeytown, and the Old 97s. Such outfits made well-written roots music that rocked with that collective commitment that makes bandcraft so fascinating. This week I present tw...
Nov 11, 2024•59 min
Episode 300: When Gaby Moreno was announced as an official showcasing artist at this Fall’s Americanafest, it stirred a tingle of recognition in me, but I had to do some digging to realize what a big deal it was. The Guatemala-born, Los Angeles-based singer and songwriter became part of the Watkins Family Hour at Largo in LA and a regular on Chris Thile’s Live From Here Show. She’s released nine records, winning two Latin Grammy Awards - and an album Grammy Award earlier this year. She’s interna...
Nov 04, 2024•59 min
Episode #299: While the public has become hyper aware of Billy Strings on his rocket ride to the top of bluegrass, only a small retinue of the music’s traditional veteran artists have achieved popular name recognition. I think especially of Del McCoury and Ricky Skaggs. But there’s a deeper world there, and we should work a little harder to shine the light on more of the old school masters working today. That’s what episode #299 of The String is about, through conversations with singer Danny Pai...
Nov 01, 2024•59 min
Episode 298: Molly Tuttle is the link in common between two exceptional breakout artists during an exciting era of bluegrass music. Bronwyn Keith-Hynes is the electrifying fiddle player in Tuttle’s band Golden Highway and a two time IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year. We get into her journey from Charlottesville, VA to school at Berklee to Nashville and the latest chapter in her solo life, the wonderful album I Built A World . AJ Lee and Tuttle go back even farther, to the family band they shared gr...
Oct 25, 2024•59 min
Episode 297: It’s an immigrant story like no other. JesseLee Jones pined for something bigger growing up in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He got glimpses of American music and a guitar, and with that a long journey began. After landing in the states, and getting robbed by the way, he found his way to a family in the midwest who took him in and helped him build a life. In the early 90s, destiny brought him to Nashville and a ramshackle honky tonk and boot store that he would help turn into Robert’s Western ...
Oct 08, 2024•59 min
Episode 296: With Americanafest landing in Nashville, Craig Havighurst looked over the many artists breaking out of Music City and got especially excited about Baltic Street Hotel by rocking songwriter Sophie Gault. It’ll be released on Friday, but Craig’s been listening for a few weeks and finds it rich with personal details, sharp melodies, and an old school Americana spirit that evokes Lucinda Williams or Kathleen Edwards. The show features exclusive teasers of several songs from this LP, pro...
Sep 24, 2024•59 min
