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The Infamous Stringdusters play ten-minute improvised jams for festival crowds with no drummer to anchor the beat. This episode traces how the band was built from three musical regions: Berklee College of Music in Boston, where Chris Pandolfi (banjo), Andy Hall (dobro), and original guitarist Chris Eldridge studied theory; Nashville, where they met mandolinist Jesse Cobb and fiddler Jeremy Garrett...

Jerry Garcia lost two-thirds of his right middle finger at age four in a wood-chopping accident and later used that hand to become one of the most unconventional guitarists in history. Born in San Francisco in 1942 and named after composer Jerome Kern, he lost his father Jose to a drowning accident, spent five years with grandparents whose radio played the Grand Ole Opry, picked up banjo before gu...

The Appalachian dulcimer, nicknamed the hog fiddle, is central to a Scotch-Irish mountain tradition, yet it has no precedent in Ireland, Scotland, or northern England. This episode traces its ancestry to European box zithers such as the Swedish hummel, Norwegian langeleik, German scheitholt, and French epinette des Vosges, carried into the mountains through German settlement in Pennsylvania. West...

Appalachian music is often imagined as a homegrown mountain tradition, but this episode makes the case that it was the original global mixtape: unaccompanied ballads like "Barbara Allen" and "Matty Groves" from northern England, Scotland, and Ulster; Neil Gow's short "saw stroke" fiddle bowing; German-derived dulcimers and the half-yodel known as vocal feathering; and the gourd banjo, clawhammer t...

In 1975, on a chart dominated by Elton John, Pink Floyd, and Earth, Wind & Fire, a live acoustic bluegrass record reached number 99 on the Billboard 200, and the band that made it had already broken up. Old & In the Way formed in San Francisco in 1973 with Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin, Peter Rowan on guitar, and John Kahn on upright bass, cycling through fiddlers Richar...

Chris Stapleton was a high school valedictorian who played football against future NFL number one pick Tim Couch, then enrolled at Vanderbilt University to study biomedical engineering. Born in Lexington in 1978 and raised in coal country in Staffordsville, Kentucky, he was the son of a mine engineer and grew up on Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, classic soul, and blues. After meetin...

The Earls of Leicester take their name from a hidden pun: the British city Leicester is pronounced "Lester," and paired with "Earl" it spells out Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. In 2013 Nashville, dobro master Jerry Douglas pitched Rounder Records on a project that would faithfully revive the sound of Flatt, Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys, treating the catalog the way a symphony treats Beetho...

The Dillards left Salem, Missouri for Los Angeles in 1962 and within weeks were signed to Elektra Records and the William Morris Agency. Brothers Rodney and Doug Dillard, Mitch Jayne, and Dean Webb became the deadpan Darling family on The Andy Griffith Show from 1963 to 1966, introducing millions of viewers to bluegrass and giving "Feudin' Banjos" (better known today as "Dueling Banjos") its first...

The Devil Makes Three play upright bass, tenor banjo and acoustic guitar with no drum kit, yet their shows feel like basement punk gigs. This episode follows how childhood friends Pete Bernhard and Cooper McBean went from punk bands around Brattleboro, Vermont, through Nashville and Olympia, Washington, to Santa Cruz, California, where they reconnected with Lucia Turino and formed the trio in 2001...

Alton and Rabon Delmore, sons of Alabama tenant farmers, won their first talent contest by tiebreaker over a comedy act and took home a sack of flour and a pair of socks. This episode follows how their mother's gospel harmonies and Rabon's four-string tenor guitar produced a syncopated sound that made them the most popular act on the Grand Ole Opry by 1936. We cover their work with Fiddlin' Arthur...

The Dead South formed in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 2012 when two grunge musicians, Nate Hilts and Danny Kenyon, decided to start a stomping bluegrass band, and bandmates Colton Crawford and Scott Pringle learned banjo and mandolin from scratch to do it. This episode follows how outsiders with no traditional training turned a punk approach to acoustic instruments into a sound one reviewer called bla...

The ballad tells of a steel-driving man who beat a steam drill and died with a hammer in his hand. This episode strips away the folklore to find the historical figure: a 19-year-old from New Jersey named John William Henry, convicted of burglary and leased by the Virginia State Penitentiary to the C&O Railway to dig tunnels. We explain what a steel driver and a shaker actually did, the differe...

Moran Lee Dock Boggs was born in 1898 in West Norton, Virginia, the youngest of ten, as railroads and coal turned quiet farm valleys into boom towns. This episode traces how he blended his family's frailing banjo style with blues picking he learned by following a guitarist called Go Lightning and watching Black string bands in the Dorchester labor camps, creating his own up-picking style in a moda...

Ron Block was a 13-year-old in Gardena, California, in the 1970s when a Flatt and Scruggs television broadcast rewired his brain. This episode follows how his father's store, Hogan's House of Music, gave him room to master Scruggs-style banjo and guitar, how he ground through the 1980s with Weary Hearts and the Lynn Morris Band, and how he joined Alison Krauss and Union Station in October 1991. We...

George Riley Puckett was blinded as an infant in 1890s Georgia when a doctor treated a minor eye condition with lead acetate. This episode follows how he learned guitar and banjo by touch at the Georgia School for the Blind, developed the driving bass run that became standard in country guitar, and earned the nickname the Bald Mountain Caruso at Atlanta's fiddlers' conventions. We trace his 1922 d...

Born blind in Henryville, Indiana, in 1980 and left with 80 percent hearing loss in one ear after a childhood infection, Michael Cleveland became one of the most decorated fiddle players in bluegrass. This episode follows how the Suzuki method at age four gave him a sonic map of the violin, and how the genre's apprenticeship model kept him out of the prodigy trap. We cover his teenage appearances...

First printed in 1913 by blind Kentucky street musician Dick Burnett as Farewell Song, Man of Constant Sorrow has been a hymn, a bluegrass standard, a folk-revival anthem, a 1970 rock single and a multi-platinum movie hit. This episode treats the song as a biographical subject and follows it across more than a century, from an 1854 newspaper poem to a Cambodian pop cover. We trace Emry Arthur's 19...

In July 1927, producer Ralph Peer set up a portable electric recording studio on the third floor of a hat factory on State Street in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia line, and in 12 days captured 76 songs by 19 acts. This episode explains why those sessions are called the big bang of country music. We cover the old acoustic horn method, the 1925 electric microphone that made field recording poss...

Wade Mainer helped invent the two-finger banjo style that bridged old-time mountain music and bluegrass, played the White House for Franklin Roosevelt, and then, at the height of his fame, packed his banjo away and took a job on a General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan. He lived to be 104. This episode follows him from a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he pr...

Scott and Seth Avett started out in loud rock bands in Concord, North Carolina, but the music that mattered happened after the shows, in late-night acoustic sessions they called Nemo Downstairs. This episode traces how those quiet songs became The Avett Brothers, from Country Was with bassist Bob Crawford in 2001 through A Carolina Jubilee, Mignonette and the lake house recording of Four Thieves G...

Wagon Wheel began as a mumbled 1973 Bob Dylan outtake from the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sessions, reached a homesick teenager named Ketch Secor through a bootleg cassette his friend Critter Fuqua bought in London, and grew verses about a hitchhiker headed to Raleigh. This episode traces the song from its blues roots to Old Crow Medicine Show's 2004 release and Darius Rucker's diamond-certifie...

Stuart Duncan's resume runs from Dolly Parton and George Strait to Yo-Yo Ma, Robert Plant and Diana Krall. Born in Quantico, Virginia, in 1964 and raised in Santa Paula, California, he learned fiddle, mandolin, guitar and banjo, joined the Nashville Bluegrass Band in 1985, and won the Academy of Country Music's fiddle player of the year award five times. This episode follows his move into Nashvill...

Before Earl Scruggs became the face of bluegrass banjo, DeWitt Snuffy Jenkins was playing a three-finger picking style on regional radio in the Carolinas. Born in Harris, North Carolina, in 1908, the youngest of ten children, he built his first banjo from scrap with his brother Verl and did not own a manufactured instrument until 1927. We follow him from the Jenkins String Band and the Crazy Water...

Sierra Hull self-published her first album, Angel Mountain, at age 10, was mentored by Alison Krauss at 11, and signed to Rounder Records at 13. This episode traces how a kid from Byrdstown, Tennessee, learned the mandolin in bluegrass jam sessions, accepted a presidential scholarship to Berklee College of Music, and mastered traditional bluegrass before taking it apart and rebuilding it in her ow...

Go to a Della Mae show and you will not find anyone named Della Mae on stage. The name comes from a character in the classic song Big Spike Hammer, a signal that this band is rooted in traditional bluegrass. This deep dive charts the Grammy-nominated group's evolution from Boston's conservatory-driven acoustic scene in 2009 to a projected 2026 release, Magic Accident, on Compass Records. We follow...