The String

Two gentlemen of Americana who share a soulful feel and a chill vibe while writing songs that cut to the bone. Seth Walker talks about his years in Austin, New Orleans and Nashville and some of the new approaches to recording that made his new album Are You Open so special. Louisiana native Steve Conn shares his story as a keyboardist, accordion player and songwriter, culminating in the candid, fu...

Episode 85 offers two remarkable stories from the always-dynamic world of bluegrass music. Michael Cleveland is the record-setting, 11-time winner of the IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year award. He's a traditionally grounded player who's reaching into new terrain as a 38-year-old phenomenon. He's also been blind since birth and he's overcome a lot, a story told in the new documentary Flamekeeper. Rou...

The British singer songwriter known as Yola made her first significant stateside impression at the 2016 AmericanaFest in Nashville. She returned the following year and won the Artist of the Year honor at the AMA's UK counterpart awards. Her charisma, her intelligent update of country soul and her astonishing voice made her an instant favorite of music fans and critics. Soon offers to record began...

Colin Linden - guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer - is one of Nashville's most interesting musicians. You may have seen him in the Americana Awards house band, or as a key live musician on the TV series Nashville or in the dynamic Canadian country rock band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. He wasn't born into the blues but he sure found the music early and made it his own, through a very early...

Fifteen years ago, Mindy Smith rocketed from local sets in Nashville to the national stage in a matter of a few months on the strength of a duet on "Jolene" with Dolly Parton and the January 2004 release of her debut album One Moment More. She became the first winner of the Americana Music Association Emerging Artist award, and wide audiences embraced her empathic songs and translucent voice. The...

Episode #81: This week, the long, diverse career of Nashville's Bill Lloyd. From country hits as a writer and artist to collaborations with leading lights of rock and pop, Bill is a dynamo. And he's got a fantastic new album out called Working The Long Game.  We hit a lot of points of Bill's biography in our conversation, but the essentials to know going in are that he moved to Nashville after col...

If Americana values all American roots forms and the fusion thereof, then nobody's more Americana than Austin singer/songwriter Ruthie Foster. She grew up singing in church in rural TX, developed a variety of skills in bands while serving in the US Navy, then became a folk troubadour who slips from country to soul to blues to gospel with ease. She has been one of if not the flagship artist for Aus...

Missy Raines grew up in rural west VA deeply immersed in bluegrass culture. And when she started playing professionally in her collegiate years, she went for it with, as she tells me, no plan B but a life in the music she loved. Over a couple of decades as a side musician, she became a pioneer and a scene favorite, winning seven IBMA awards for her bass playing alone. In 2008, she made real a long...

The String launches a new year with a conversation with Rodney Crowell,  one of the legit icons of Americana music. The Texas born, Nashville based songwriter was one of the artists around whom the format was created 20 years ago, and indeed he won the Americana Music Association's lifetime achievement award for songwriting in 2006. He's a valued collaborator, earning a Grammy Award for his recent...

How and why this humble collection of towns hugging the Tennessee River in northern Alabama became a historic musical hot spot is an improbable, wonderful American story. But I grew interested in Muscle Shoals of today. More and more, roots and rock and roll musicians have been traveling there to record. A string of remarkable bands and songwriters, including Jason Isbell, John Paul White, St. Pau...

This week, an evenly split hour with very different artists who have a lot to say about change and growth. The Gibson Brothers   took their experience from two decades in bluegrass and poured it into a radically different project written and produced with Dan Auerbach. Ruby Boots has been "shedding her skin" regularly through a life on at least three continents. She's now a mainstay in the East Na...

Bob Dylan's transition from solo folk troubadour to electric roots rocker was as important a precursor to the idea of Americana music as any other. And that transition reached its apex with the 1966 masterpiece Blonde On Blonde . We devote this whole episode to the album. My featured guest is longtime Nashville music journalist Daryl Sanders who's just published That Thin Wild Mercury Sound, the f...

Episode 74: Kathy Mattea's new album Pretty Bird is her first release in six years. In the time between, she's struggled through some problems with her voice and in so doing reached outside of her musical comfort zones. After a couple of albums dedicated to exploring her Appalachian heritage, this one's more eclectic. She calls it a journey back to singing for the sheer joy of it. Mattea has alway...

What is tradition in music? It turns out that's a tricky but illuminating question, and this week Craig puts it to a range of folks at the World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, NC. CJ Lewandowski of the hot new Po' Ramblin' Boys (pictured) want to build bridges between fans of the inside and outside. Doyle Lawson applies it to the atmosphere he's set at his 39-year-old festival in Denton, NC. John Showma...

This week circles back one final time to AmericanaFest 2018, where a global community dedicated to American roots music gathered and networked and listened to some of the world's best music. Amy Helm, out solo after a decade with Olabelle and working with her late great father Levon, is an exceptional singer with the new album This Too Shall Light.  Veteran alt-country and bluegrass singer songwri...

Episode #71: This week we get out of the studio for three radio field trips with some remarkable songwriter/artists. First I visit with Rayland Baxter at the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum about his explosively colorful new album Wide Awake. Next it's off to the ballpark for nine questions in nine innings with rocking country songwriter Nora Jane Struthers. Finally I sit on the upper deck of th...

Episode 70: Shemekia Copeland was born to sing, raised by blues royalty. Her dad, Johnny Clyde Copeland, took his Louisiana and Texas roots to the New York City area where he based a career that landed him a Grammy award and a spot in the Blues Hall of Fame. Shemekia sang all her life and by 18 she was on record and on the minds of everyone looking at the next generation of the blues. And she's wo...

Episode 69 is the first in a series of shows reporting on artists who performed at AmericanaFest 2018, the most wide-ranging and diverse convention in its 19 years. Americana continues to represent and promote classic country music, bluegrass and songwriter-driven roots music. It also has become more reflective of the blues, soul and regional folk styles. This week Craig visits with Mississippi ra...

Episode 68: At 31 years old, Brittany Haas has been in high level touring string bands more than half her life and she's already regarded as one of the finest fiddle players in the world. As part of Crooked Still, she helped shape a new strain of traditional Americana. Of late she's been touring with the Dave Rawlings Machine, playing as part of the house band on public radio's Live From Here with...

Since the 1980s and a golden age of Nashville pub rock and alt-country, Webb Wilder has been The Last of the Full Grown Men, a crowd-rousing, semi-campy, always hard rocking blend of SUN Records rock and roll, surf music and hillbilly twang. He was born and raised in Hattiesburg, MS - a music freak from the get go. He and a high school friend launched themselves into music by moving to Austin in t...

Episode #66: At 76 years old, Steve Cropper is in ideal position to reflect on an abundant, history making life in music, and he does so in this week's show. It's a special edition taped on stage in front of an eager audience at Nashville's Who Knew at City Winery. The series features speakers from the local to the world famous, on matters of creativity, entrepreneurship and mission. And Steve Cro...

Episode 65: To understand the unique and intricate Nashville based quintet Cordovas, you've got to flash back to the early 2000s when a songwriter from North Carolina named Joe Firstman was tearing it up in Los Angeles. Blazingly talented, he got signed to Atlantic Records but it was a brutal time for the music industry and he went his own way in 2005. He was the bandleader for a late night networ...

We're spending much of this hour with someone who's as thoughtful and articulate about her art as the art itself. Gretchen Peters is a lover of language. She has awe and appropriate respect for the power of words and healthy fear of their misuse. And while I would place her among the most literary of songwriters - Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan are among her heroes - there's nothing aloof or unreacha...

This week's episode of The String (#63) is about a sense of place and how we stand up for the places we cherish. Nashville has thrived as the epicenter of country music songwriting in part because of its own strong sense of place. It was a mid South crossroads city that welcomed art and music from the 19th century on. It became a pioneer in radio in the 20s and 30s by reflecting and broadcasting l...

Erin Rae came of age in Nashville and dropped out of college to get serious about music. She is a pure product of Music City's richly rewarding community, veteran of open mics and local venues. Her first album Soon Enough turned a lot of heads. Now her follow up, the moody and gorgeous but emotionally candid Putting On Airs, is earning national acclaim. She's one of East Nashville's new stars, and...