The String

Episode 354: The Infamous Stringdusters emerged out of Nashville's world-class but somewhat undiscovered bluegrass scene of the 2000s. Six guys with different professional pathways into the music and wide ranging tastes in other genres got to know each other at gigs, picking parties, and the IBMA World of Bluegrass. And their first gesture as a band - the 2007 album Fork In The Road - was a triumph, winning three IBMA Awards. Since those days and after a couple of early personnel changes, today's quintet has become a huge force in jamgrass music with a fierce and in-demand live show. Yet they turn back to some of the simpler and more blues-based elements of their core heritage on their new 20th anniversary release, 20/20. Craig speaks with Chris Pandolfi (banjo), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), and Andy Falco (guitar).   

Episode 353: He was an East Tennessee country guitar prodigy who was invited on the Grand Ole Opry at age 11 by Marty Stuart, and Trey Hensley has made good on that promise by emerging as one of the finest singers and pickers in contemporary roots music. His national profile took shape after forming a super-flexible duo with dobro master Rob Ickes around 2016. Now, after four albums, collaborations with Taj Mahal and a Grammy nomination, Hensley has revved up his songwriting and made Can't Outrun The Blues, which is not his first solo album but the one he regards as his true artistic debut.   

Episode 352: When Emily Scott Robinson released Appalachia, her fifth album in a 10-year career and her third for Nashville boutique Oh Boy Records, it spiked up into the Americana airplay top ten, something that had never happened to her before. But she had set the table through quality songwriting, ambitious touring, and a luminous voice that embraces the dark and the light with a rare alchemy. At WMOT's Eastside studio, Craig and Emily speak about her newest work with super-producer Josh Kaufman and the hard work that led to it.

Episode 351: Justin Townes Earle, blazingly gifted and deeply troubled, died of an accidental drug overdose in 2020 at the age of 38, after a life beset by addiction. Six years later, two coincident projects expand on what we knew about the songwriter with a mix of compassion and regret. Sammy Brue, Earle's much younger friend and protegé, has written a song cycle based on Justin's private notebooks, shared by his widow. Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Bernstein recently published the first definitive biography of Steve Earle's son. Both join Craig in this hour of remembrance and appreciation. 

Episode 350: Since breaking out with his 1989 major-label album How Did You Find Me Here, North Carolina's David Wilcox has been a consistently excellent practitioner of the new folk, fingerstyle guitar arts. The songwriter, known for his empathic writing and audience-embracing shows, is now 67 and still thinking deep thoughts about the world, compassion, art, and the arc of life. He stopped through Nashville last November to talk about maintaining a "visionary attitude" over time and his latest album The Way I Tell The Story.   

Episode 349: For its 38th annual conference, Folk Alliance International returned to New Orleans, home of their largest-ever event (2020's draw of 3,600 people) and the epicenter of one of the nation's great regional roots music legacies. Besides a slate of Louisiana talent in blues, Cajun and zydeco, FAI was once again distinguished by diversity of style, genre, and nationality. Craig captured conversations with showcasing artists Joy Clark, Tyler Ramsey & Carl Broemel, Sparrow Smith, Maisy Owen, and Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light.   

Episode 348: Kristina Train is a singer and songwriter who should be on more people's radar. Her remarkable resume was built in the jazz world (Blue Note Records and touring with Herbie Hancock), but the Savannah, GA native has always shown mastery for a seductive strain of country soul. That goes explicit on the powerful yet subtle 2025 album County Line. Craig speaks with Train about her critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s and her decade or so as a Nashvillian.  

Episode 347: Rachael Price became an American fixture as the dynamic and flawless lead singer of roots/pop phenomenon Lake Street Dive. Long before she and the Dive were headlining Madison Square Garden, she was a Hendersonville, TN native pursuing a career in classic jazz, after her girlhood idol Ella Fitzgerald. This is the story of how a music school friend - guitarist, singer, and songwriter Vilray - helped her build a parallel life pursuing her first musical love. They have incredible chemistry on and off stage, as you'll hear in this fascinating interview. 

Episode 346: To say that a lot has happened since Molly Tuttle last appeared on The String in 2019 would be an understatement. She's won two Grammy Awards and been nominated for two more. She won her first IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Award, to go along with her two groundbreaking Guitar Player trophies. But most important, she's been through two entire stylistic swings in her musical vision and recording career. And she got engaged to Ketch Secor. So we cover a lot of ground in our latest conversation.

Episode 345:  Last year, The String got a new opening theme tune. "Vera" comes from New York based mandolin virtuoso, composer and band leader Jacob Jolliff. The Oregon native came East when he got a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music and joined a cadre of future acoustic stars clustered in the Boston area. He's worked for some big-league bands including Joy Kills Sorrow and Yonder Mountain String Band, but in this decade he's pursued his own four-piece Jacob Jolliff Band. We talk about building the audience for instrumental, improvisational acoustic music and about select pieces from Jake's fascinating discography.   

Episode 344: Ashley Monroe moved to Nashville just after 10th grade from East Tennessee with a single-minded drive to sing and write country music. Her career would be the envy of many - Grammy nominations, several major label albums, and Pistol Annies, an influential supergroup - and yet many in roots music haven't recognized her as among the greats of our time. Following recovery from blood cancer, Monroe dove into her most ambitious and daring project yet, Tennessee Lightning.

Episode 343: Her name is made of flowers. And she's been spreading bouquets of joy and open-hearted country and rockabilly for more than 50 years. She is Rosie Flores, sounding great and enjoying the stage as much as she ever has as she cruised past her 75th birthday during Americanafest 2025. A couple days after that, we sat down to talk about her (outstandingly) supportive parents, the Los Angeles alt-country scene of the 1980s and 90s, and her new album Impossible Frontiers.

Episode #342: Daniel Donato became one of Nashville's more revered electric guitar players during his three years playing four nights a week at Robert's Western World on Lower Broadway. When he lost that gig in 2015, he had to start from scratch as a working musician and songwriting artist. In his second appearance on The String, Donato talks about landing some touring band gigs that sustained him while he developed his Cosmic Country concept. The band and his repute grew, and ten years after leaving Broadway, he headlined the Ryman Auditorium. Also on the table here, his two recent albums, Reflector and Horizons. 

Episode 341: Since co-founding the history-making, history-preserving North Mississippi Allstars almost 30 years ago, Luther Dickinson has taken his guitar, his deep blues repertoire, and his Memphis soul around the world and into all kinds of collaborations. In his latest return to The String, we talk about the nature of improvising and some of his recent experimental and instrumental projects, plus the 2025 Allstars album Still Rollin', marking the 25th anniversary of the band's debut album.   

Episode 340: Robert Randolph had no plans or dreams to take his fiery talents on the pedal steel guitar beyond the New Jersey church where he grew up and the network of pentecostal Black churches around the country that made the "sacred steel" a core part of their services. But his passionate sound and his joyful improvisational spirit were a perfect match for the jam/rock scene of the early 2000s. He's been a steady contributor ever since, through wide collaborations and a string of albums with his "Family Band." Now he's leading the band under his own name and he has a fabulous new record on the revitalized Sun Records.

Episode 339: South Carolina guitar wizard and powerhouse singer Marcus King has come through the valley of shadows, breaking self-destructive habits and arriving at a place of contentment and love on his latest album Darling Blue. In a career-spanning conversation, King talks about his unique path to finding his voice on the guitar, his collaborations with a series of very different world-class producers, and his place in the shifting ecosystems of jam band and Americana music.

Episode 338: North Carolina songwriter Tift Merritt became an instant star of Americana music when she emerged in the early 2000s with Bramble Rose (2002) and Tambourine (2004), but only with time have we learned that her relationship with her prestige record label - Lost Highway Records - was tumultuous and dispiriting. After a period of relative quiet on the music front, she's re-issued Tambourine on vinyl for the first time and put out a collection of demo/kitchen tapes that contextualize that classic. From her home in Raleigh, Tift lets us in on her diversified creative life. And we round out the hour catching up with Texas songwriter Tony Kamel, who's released We're All Gonna Live, his second in a row made with master Bruce Robison.   

Episode 337: Ken Pomeroy, who turned 23 days after this interview, is a fresh voice not just from the Oklahoma lineage of great roots songwriting and musicianship, but also from a new generation of Native American voices in popular music. She talks about her Cherokee heritage and the stewardship that comes with it, plus her emotional bond to music in this introspective hour. You'll also hear incisive and sometimes sad songs from her acclaimed national debut Cruel Joke, out this spring on Rounder Records.   

Episode 336: In a time when bluegrass is surging with young talent and mainstream dreams, Danny Burns and Shelby Means offer two profiles in making the string band business work in 2025. Burns is an Irish immigrant who brought his trad training and hearty work ethic from his native County Donegal. Even before releasing North Country in 2018, he'd made a name and reputation among roots music elites, and he shows his flair for cover songs on the new Southern Sky. Shelby Means played bass for Della Mae during their breakout years and became stylishly famous working with Molly Tuttle's Golden Highway Band. When that came to an end this year, she had her debut solo album ready to go. 

Episode 335: Leslie Jordan, the Nolensville, TN-based songwriter not the late comic actor and singer, makes a major statement in her pivot from a robust career in Christian folk/pop to storytelling Americana with The Agonist. It's a song cycle that fleshes out the story of her late grandfather, a conflicted and complex man who left his family in Indiana when Leslie's mother was four years old. Through a unique collaboration with a collection of his posthumous journals and writings, she builds a world and a character, holding him accountable while investing his story with dignity. It's beautifully produced with Kenneth Pattengale and is one of the most impressive albums of 2025.