Craig Havighurst

Gary Louris of The Jayhawks kicks off the first episode of WMOT's annual 30A Songwriters Sessions, where we invite artists to perform acoustic sets in a beach house turned studio near Santa Rosa Beach, Florida during the 30A Songwriters Festival. Louris performed "Getting Older" and "Couldn't Live a Day Without You" from his latest solo record, Dark Country, and The Jayhawk's tune "All the Right Reasons.” Plus a warm conversation with Jessie Scott.

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’s releasing an epic 18-song collection called Nature Of Necessity, a masterwork that could only have been realized in Music City.

Shelby Means has been a fast friend and key woman in the acoustic music scene at least as far back as the early days of the bluegrass band Della Mae. That’s when I first became aware of her powerful bass playing and singing anyway. In recent years, tens of thousands have come to know her as the driving rhythm machine in Molly Tuttle’s Golden Highway band, with whom she shared the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album. This week, Amy, hosting solo, premieres Shelby’s first single as a solo artist, previewing a full album coming later this year. After that auspicious start, the show winds through Amy’s cool tastes for old-time, early blues, and down-home Cajun music, so it helps it landed just around Mardis Gras. You’ll hear a new Alison Krauss single too!

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 and gospel. In this hour, founding singer and songwriter Pete Bernhard reflects on a career that’s surprised him and the joyful process behind the rather dark and candid album Spirits, their tenths as a band.

When record man David Freeman was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2002, he was celebrated for setting “high standards for recording, documenting, and producing artist projects, raising the bar for the entire industry.” His main vehicles were County Records, which he founded in the 1960s to promote old-time and traditional music, and Rebel Records, one of the iconic bluegrass labels, which he acquired in 1979. This week, Amy and I focus on Rebel and County through the years, from its work with Ralph Stanley, the Country Gentleman and Seldom Scene in the early days through many albums by latter day legends Blue Highway, IIIrd Tyme Out, The Traditional Grass, Claire Lynch, Ronnie Bowman, Kenny & Amanda Smith, Paul Williams, Steep Canyon Rangers, Don Rigsby, Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers and Junior Sisk. You’ll hear many of those greats, plus the Kody Norris Show, one of Rebel’s current stars, with a brand new single.

WMOT isn’t the only Nashville radio station that opened a new studio in 2024. The other one is twice as old and changed American music history. WSM 650 AM, known since the 1930s as the Air Castle of the South, conceived and built the Grand Ole Opry, oversaw a massive, multi-genre live music apparatus, launched the business environment known as Music Row, and even gave Music City its identity and name. And this coming Oct. 5 will be its 100th birthday. So it was due to get some gifts, including a new broadcast studio and museum.

Two anticipated acoustic/bluegrass albums dropped in the last couple of weeks, from North Carolina’s Chatham Rabbits and New York’s Nefesh Mountain, and I hope you’ll read my dual review at our WMOT Roots Radio News section. But here I want to spotlight Dusky Waters and her song “Southeasterly Wind,” which Amy Alvey suggested as part of a block representing artists she was excited about during her recent visit to Folk Alliance International in Montreal. The multi-instrumental artist’s given name is Jenn Jeffers, and she’s making waves in her adopted home town of New Orleans by co-founding “Black Americanafest,” which launched last September. Here, Dusky Waters wields an accordion in a brooding, mystical protest song from her second album, 2023’s Pass It On. Also in the Folk Alliance block, The Small Glories, spotlighting the fact that powerhouse vocalist Cara Luft is prepping a solo project, spanking new bluegrass from Liam Purcell, and a gorgeous string quartet from Medusa. This week also spotlights Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Tall Poppy String Band, and Wilson Banjo Co.

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 first in five years - and her first independent release - is A Tip Toe High Wire, coming March 7. This episode complements a bio-oriented show in 2018, emphasizing Hull’s recent work with Béla Fleck, Cory Wong and others, and of course the thought behind and production of her newest release.

Up in New York, Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff lead Nefesh Mountain, a one-of-a-kind progressive string band that has blended bluegrass, newgrass, and traditional Jewish folk music for just over a decade. Their Jan. 31 release, Beacons, is an ambitious double album with an Americana side and a bluegrass side. Then on Valentine’s Day, North Carolina couple Austin and Sarah McCombie - The Chatham Rabbits - offered their fourth album Be Real With Me, a nine-song set that sees their songwriting getting more personally candid and their sound enhanced by electric textures and percussion for the first time. As they both deal honestly with being married for love and music, I can hear these recordings in conversation with each other.

The Shoats or the Wild Shoats, depending on which thing you read about them, formed in 2023 and then immediately won the Appalachian String Band Music Festival’s Neo-Traditional Band Competition that year. Now the quartet is out opening dates for bluegrass band Big Richard. The personnel is West VA natives Mary Linscheid and Alex Heflin, and Pennsylvanian brothers Gus and Huck Tritsch. They’ve just released their debut album called Yell In The Shoats, and we’re sure to be tapping it in the coming weeks. We start with one of my favorite versions of the old folk song “Moonshiner” I’ve ever heard. You’ll have to wait to the end of the show to hear it, because it’s that good. On the way, we salute Jason Carter on the news that he’s retiring from the Del McCoury Band and the Travelin’ McCourys. And we offer new tracks from Unspoken Tradition and Graham Sharp, plus the return of fiddling Rhiannon Giddens, in a new duet with Justin Robinson.