If nothing else was left behind about America in the 20th century but the lyrics to all the country songs written by the famous and the obscure, you’d have a pretty good catalog of what happened and how we worked and how we fought, how we loved each other and judged each other and murdered each other. How we socialized and danced and drank and raised families. That’s no small feat for a genre of music. It’s a more vivid and truthful diary of American life than the last 100 years of the New York ...
Apr 24, 2018•59 min
Two years ago, Lydia and Laura Rogers, the Alabama siblings who harmonize together so enchantingly as The Secret Sisters, looked like they had it all figured out. They’d built a sterling reputation with critics and a strong fan base. T-Bone Burnett was their record producer and they were in demand. But behind the scenes, the artists were suffering, at times despondent and afraid all they’d built and all they wanted to do was being torn away from them. They’d been cast adrift by their label. Face...
Apr 12, 2018•1 hr
With the aggressive acoustic bass, second-line intricate drumming and soaring brotherly harmony, the Wood Brothers have become a mainstay of roots and Americana music. What began well over a decade ago as a casual and personal initiative to spend more time together as brothers took on a life of its own and has grown steadily from listening rooms to a recent debut at the Ryman Auditorium. It was an experiment with potent inputs. Oliver had spent years on the blues circuit, first with band leader ...
Mar 27, 2018•1 hr 1 min
David Ball is one of our best traditional country singers, a regular on the Grand Ole Opry and that rare classic indie who had big radio hits in two different decades. But before he twanged us up with Thinkin' Problem, in his well-spent youth, he was bass player and singer in Uncle Walt's Band, one of the most exceptional and under-appreciated ensembles in roots music history. The acoustic trio was made up of Champ Hood on fiddle and Walter Hyatt on guitar. All three contributed to the complex s...
Mar 20, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Lillie Mae has lived a classic Nashville journey. She came of age on Lower Broadway, playing six nights a week with her family band as a teenager. She and her siblings were mentored and produced by the great Cowboy Jack Clement. Her band was signed to and dropped from a major country label. Then she became a side musician for Jack White and eventually, he asked her to join the roster of Third Man Records, where she made the acclaimed debut album Forever And Then Some. The 26 year old is already ...
Mar 12, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Delbert McClinton has two gifts that have served him well. He’s got a one in a million voice. It’s thunder and whiskey and leather and silk. It’s instantly recognizable. It’s innate and inimitable. Delbert’s other gift is a lifelong stubborn refusal to lend that voice to anything he doesn’t love, and he’s got really top drawer taste. He has released nothing for the sake of a short term hit and thus nothing that he needs to apologize for. Over 50 years. Delbert’s the subject of a new biography, O...
Mar 06, 2018•1 hr
The 30th annual Folk Alliance International conference recently wrapped in Kansas City. It’s a confab like no other, with countless showcase performances large and small. And it’s the subject of this week’s multi-artist edition of The String. Of the interviews I did on site, these emerged as the best cross section of this unique and intense event. Featuring, in order: Richard Thompson Martha Redbone Jayme Stone Ed Snodderly Vivian Leva
Feb 25, 2018•59 min
Songwriter, singer and mandolin virtuoso Sierra Hull was born in Byrdstown, TN in 1991. Halfway between Nashville and the Smoky Mountains, it was an advantageous place to study bluegrass music, which she decided was her life’s calling at about age eight. Less than a decade after releasing her debut album on Rounder Records at age 16, Hull was named IBMA Mandolin player of the year two years running, the first woman to win the prize. She also, at age 26, recently married longtime music community ...
Feb 13, 2018•1 hr
Most songwriters start writing in their teens and THEN accumulate the life experience that give their work insight and heft. Mary Gauthier flipped the script. Like fellow American musician Louis Armstrong, she was orphaned in New Orleans. Her youth was, to use the euphemism, troubled. At 15 and 16 she was addicted to alcohol and drugs and in rehab. She famously spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell. She didn’t start writing songs until her 30s and when she did, there was a remarkably, fully for...
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 2 min
He's been a key part of Alison Krauss & Union Station for 25 years. He's the voice of the most popular and successful bluegrass track of the 21st century in "Man of Constant Sorrow." And he's one of the most admired acoustic musicians all around in his field. Looking for new directions and challenges during a break from AKUS, Dan Tyminski started writing songs with Music Row songwriters he'd never met before. And before long he found a surprising new sound emerging and some thoughts and feel...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr
This hour, a tale of two Johns. My guest is John Jorgenson, one of the most well-rounded and admired guitar players of the last 40 years. His life and career have carried him from the country music hot spots in his native California to the studios of Nashville to world tours with Elton John and on to a global reputation as a master of gypsy style jazz guitar. We’ll touch on all of that. But our main topic when we sat down was the other John, the songwriter John D. Loudermilk. Jorgenson helped pr...
Jan 12, 2018•59 min
American Folk, a feature film that's already won numerous jury prizes at film festivals, starts its theatrical run in late January of 2018. First time writer/director David Heinz wanted true-life folk singers to play the lead characters, rather than actors playing at folk singing. And Amber Rubarth is a certified folk singer. Raised in California, she discovered music as a creative outlet at about 20 years old, but as soon as she took her fresh voice to New York in the 2000s she found support an...
Dec 20, 2017•59 min
The plan was to spend an hour with David Rawlings, an artist who’s releasing brilliant folk albums, touring to huge acclaim and driving a new string band agenda. The plan was to ask him about his emergence in recent years as a leader and artist of note after so many years of playing the not silent but often unbilled partner of Gillian Welch. Then, in a happy turn of events, Gillian Welch came along. And the conversation became an exploration of a legendary partnership that changed the course of ...
Dec 16, 2017•1 hr
Blessed are the storytellers, and this week we’ll visit with two of them from the world of roots music. Thirty years into his recording career, Radney Foster is a certified star of Texas songwriting and authentic country music. Always intellectually restless, Foster has widened his scope in recent years by songwriting with military veterans and writing fiction. Recently he released an album and a book of complementary short stories under the title For You To See The Stars. Joe Kendrick’s medium ...
Dec 05, 2017•59 min
It’s a love story, with an all banjo soundtrack. Hollywood would never buy the pitch. But it’s better that it’s real life. Béla Fleck is the most famous banjo player of his time, a searcher who’s played and preserved traditional bluegrass while innovating on his instrument in jazz fusion and classical concert music, among many other things. Abigail Washburn, with great suddenness, embraced Appalachian old time banjo and folk singing, becoming one of the most revered traditional artists of her ge...
Nov 23, 2017•1 hr
It’s hard to over-state the importance of Norbert Putnam to Southern music. As a teenager he was one of a handful of guys who built the legendary recording scene in Muscle Shoals from scratch. Working with a young Rick Hall and Tom Stafford, plus some fellow musicians, they figured out how to make records and then how to make hit records. And they made history. Then Putnam and several of his studio musician colleagues moved to Nashville and ushered in a new era when a swirl of genres from soul t...
Nov 07, 2017•1 hr
Jerry Douglas in the encyclopedias as the singular innovator of the Dobro, that horizontal acoustic slide guitar developed in the early 20th century. But that’s like calling Charlie Parker a saxophone player. Jerry is a consummate creator who found an unlikely muse and who made the most of it. Among the vast catalog, Douglas has recorded or performed with: Charlie Waller’s Country Gentlemen, The Whites, Ricky Skaggs, JD Crowe, Dolly Parton, Ray Charles, James Taylor, Garth Brooks, Elvis Costello...
Oct 31, 2017•59 min
Since his band the North Mississippi Allstars broke out in the early 2000s, Luther Dickinson has been at the vanguard of an important roots music revival. Not only has he and his brother Cody championed a reconsideration of hill country blues, they've amplified the legacy of their father Jim Dickinson and his many contributions to the music of Memphis and its rural surroundings. They’ve collaborated widely and reached audiences that previously had little contact with deep African-American roots ...
Oct 19, 2017•1 hr
On the cover of Ben Sollee’s new album Kentucky Native, an astronaut with a pick axe on his shoulder looks at Earth from the surface of the moon, contemplating loneliness and the fragility of life. He’s the subject of the song “Moon Miner” on the artist’s thirteenth recording, one that does some mining of its own - of the Kentucky bluegrass tradition and of his state’s complicated economic and environmental evolution. In more than a decade of a multi-faceted career, Sollee has never settled into...
Oct 10, 2017•59 min
AmericanaFest 2017 is in the books, and it was large and loud. Fifty venues across Nashville. A new hotel headquarters. It felt the same yet different. We’re 18 years into this thing after all. It’s hard to discern trends from inside the belly of the beast. But in the hour ahead we’ll try. Five artists or groups from different generations and places on the musical spectrum talk about career, art, commerce, inclusion and exclusion and the elusive but cherished idea that is Americana music. In cas...
Oct 04, 2017•1 hr 2 min
The Great Smoky Mountains of Western NC are ancient but alive. The region gave us Charlie Poole, Doc Watson and now a cadre of diverse and important bands and artists working the many strains of regional roots in the venues around Asheville. Town Mountain is doing that for bluegrass music with a sound that’s old school and songs that tell a new generation’s story. Lead singer Robert Greer is my guest. The scene around Asheville boasts dozens of bands and artists, songwriting retreats, the basics...
Sep 22, 2017•55 min
Kim Buie got into the music business through college radio. She’s worked in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville at a variety of record companies including some industry giants and some important indie labels. And she’s touched a lot of genres, working with artists as diverse as Tom Waits, the Butthole Surfers, Etta James and Richard Thompson. Starting about 15 years ago, she settled into the Americana/roots world as head of A&R for Lost Highway Records, home to Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams a...
Aug 30, 2017•59 min
Bluegrass, more than any other genre of music I’ve ever seen, raises and nurtures its next generation of musicians and fans. Through festival culture, picking parties and families, kids get involved early and develop rapidly. And with each decade, it seems the prodigies are younger and better. It’s something else to watch. In this hour, interviews with three rising stars of bluegrass music. They’re young, hungry and really good. Molly Tuttle, Casey Campbell and Billy Strings are my guests. They ...
Aug 23, 2017•59 min
Music fans have seen and heard him on stage for years with Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris and others. He’s the guy with the pork pie hat (which the evidence will show he was wearing before it was a fad) playing the organ and the accordion. He’s also a successful producer and songwriter. His story is fascinating. His journey of faith is personal and challenging. And he’s one of Nashville’s deep thinkers and understated musical heroes. Phil Madeira is my guest. Madeira grew up in Barrington, Rhode I...
Aug 15, 2017•59 min
Glen Campbell, who died this week at age 81, rose from a sharecropper family in Delight AR to the pinnacle of American pop culture. He was a singer for the ages and a musician's musician. In this re-posting of a String episode from the Fall of 2016, Craig talks about Glen Campbell with his daughter Ashley, long time sideman and friend Carl Jackson and the filmmaker who documented Campbell's final tour and his life with Alzheimer's disease.
Aug 10, 2017•54 min
Mac Gayden was a Nashville native, with family roots that go back to the founding of the city. But his upper crust upbringing was no hindrance to his passion for African American music as a teenager. He snuck into R&B clubs on Jefferson Street in the 1950s and soaked up the late night sounds on WLAC radio. When he started working in studios and writing songs, he found himself comfortably and happily in the overlapping zone between soul, blues, country and R&B. Besides writing Everlasting...
Aug 03, 2017•59 min
Danny Barnes became a major player in the evolution of alternative country music when his acoustic trio the Bad Livers broke out of Austin Texas. Danny, Mark Rubin and Ralph White wielded tuba, accordion, fiddle, upright bass and banjo in ways that might have been considered scandalous had they not been so creative, witty and cathartic. They toured with big punk bands and wrote smart, quirky songs. They were able to twist roots and bluegrass music so far by knowing and loving the genres so well....
Jul 18, 2017•59 min
It might be the most frustrating thing about Nashville. Periodically, a guy will emerge who’s obviously on par with the great country icons. This guy will write, sing and play guitar as if ordained. Everyone in town testify to his gifts. But this guy will spend years getting better instead of bigger. He will tend to his art while the industry struggles to find a box for him. He will be seen by some as too country for country radio and too country radio for Americana. I’m not alone in seeing that...
Jul 12, 2017•59 min
In episode 26 we went deep on the banjo. I asked three leading contemporary players how they’d fallen for their instrument and what they thought about the state of the banjo in 2017. There is a LOT we did not and could not cover, including the African American origins of the banjo and its multi century journey through many genres of music. But there are great resources out there on that subject including the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby NC and the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma city. We were...
Jun 26, 2017•44 min
In one of the early sequences of the celebrated new grateful dead documentary Long Strange Trip from Amazon studios, much is made of Jerry Garcia’s first real girlfriend. She’s feisty and adorable and ablaze with love for art and the bohemian life. She’s planning to make a life with Jerry until! He picks up the banjo and starts practicing hours a day. And she leaves him. Man I wish Jerry could see the roots music scene today. Banjo has been, to use a term that’s ubiquitous now in politics, norma...
Jun 25, 2017•1 hr 3 min
