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Craig Havighurst

Editorial Director

Craig Havighurst is WMOT's editorial director and host of The String, a weekly interview show airing Mondays at 8 pm, repeating Sundays at 7 am. He also co-hosts The Old Fashioned on Saturdays at 9 am and Tuesdays at 8 pm. Threads and Instagram: @chavighurst. Email: craig@wmot.org

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  • Look at us! 100 episodes of The Old Fashioned, done and dusted. And as we approached this self-congratulatory landmark and thought about how to mark it, we got struck by the idea of celebrating bluegrass and old-time in an even more focused way – by spinning selections from the GOATs of the string band genres – or at least one impulsive stab at the greatest of all time. We start of course with Bill Monroe and then we check out the first great fiddler of the Grand Ole Opry, Arthur Smith. Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers had to be here, as did Jimmy Martin and the Osborne Brothers. Amy pulled in Hazel and Alice, and Ola Belle Reed and John Hartford. I needed to play Bela Fleck’s “Whitewater” as a way to get into the era of bluegrass that seduced me. And we end with Ricky Skaggs, the dominant bluegrass patriarch of our time. Of course we missed other legends and another attempt at an hour of GOATs might look quite different. But that’s the beauty of it. We’re back next week with all the latest releases!
  • The Wonder Women of Country, a side project of busy Americana songwriter/artists Brennen Leigh, Kelly Willis and Melissa Carper, started in 2021 as a touring vehicle for three friends with compatible visions of country music. Fans have been loving it, and naturally they started asking if there was a recording to take home. The WWOC have made good on that desire with a self-titled EP, released on March 15.
  • After more than a decade helming her progressive acoustic band The New Hip, bass player Missy Raines has reconfigured and turned back to the music she was raised on and the genre for which she’s been named Bass Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association ten times, most recently in 2021. Her new band is called Allegheny, and her new album Highlander finds her singing about the lonesome wind, fast-moving trains, and more weighty and contemporary subjects in the old school style.
  • As we approached our 100th show, I got the goofy idea of festooning our 99th episode of The Old Fashioned with songs about Nines. After all, bluegrass seems to bring that number up often, starting with “Nine Pound Hammer,” so I pulled Tony Rice’s iconic version from the great Manzanita album. Then we were off to the races with the “Wreck Of The Old No. 9” by Doc and Merle Watson, a great version of “99 Year Blues” from the Rock Hearts and Amy’s pick, the hard driving band Hard Drive with “49 Cats in a Rain Barrell.” Because why not? There IS new music, from Thomas Cassell and Crandall Creek, plus a show-closing block of great banjo led bands featuring Cory Walker, Alan Munde, Jeremy Stevens and Kristin Scott Benson.
  • Few pickers have toured harder or traveled farther than jamgrass veteran Vince Herman, who co-founded the iconic Leftover Salmon 34 years ago in Colorado. Yet there are always new things to try, so he’s added the band The High Hawks to his list of collaborations. Our sit-down visit was sparked by that band’s album Mother Nature’s Show doing so well on the Americana chart and by his own recent move from Colorado to Nashville, where he’s become a hub of the picking scene and an avid co-writer. We cover a lot of ground from his origins in Pittsburgh and West Virginia to the everlasting desire to play the next show. Also in the hour, progressive banjo player Kyle Tuttle calls in from a fishing trip to talk about his years with Molly Tuttle and his new solo album Labor Of Lust.
  • John Leventhal is one of the quiet achievers of American roots music going back more than 30 years. Early on as a guitar player in his native New York City, he connected with Jim Lauderdale and Shawn Colvin, co-writing and producing their debut albums. He met his wife Rosanne Cash as they worked on the pivotal album The Wheel. He’s produced some epic albums since then for William Bell, Sarah Jarosz, and others, winning numerous Grammy and Americana awards in the process. At last, he lent his guitar and studio skills to making the solo debut album Rumble Strip. Rosanne is there for some duo vocals, but otherwise it’s warm and tuneful instrumentals that foreground some of the lovely textures and grooves that have been behind so many albums we’ve loved.
  • Banjo player Terry Baucom was everywhere that mattered in bluegrass in the late 20th century. In the 1970s, the North Carolina native co-founded Boone Creek with Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, a band whose impact on the music was bigger than its two albums would suggest. In the 80s, the so-called “Duke of Drive” was an original and longstanding member of Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. Then in the 1990s, he co-founded IIIrd Tyme Out with Russell Moore. That’s an astonishing track record. He passed away last December and when mandolinist Ashby Frank issued the single “Knee Deep In Bluegrass,” a Baucom tune as a tribute, we made a block around it with some key Terry Baucom performances. He will be missed. Also this week, a new Donna Ulisse album, an understated David Grier instrumental, and the great Black fiddler Earl White.
  • History was on Béla Fleck’s mind as he released Rhapsody In Blue on Feb. 16, the 100th anniversary of its 1924 premiere. It's a multi-faceted, album-length celebration of the great work of American music - and its adaptability. The centerpiece is a 19-minute classical version by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra with Fleck playing Gershwin’s tricky piano part on banjo. But there are blues and bluegrass versions of the piece too. Because even at age 65, when he could be coasting on all he’s done, Fleck still looks for apparently the hardest thing he could possibly try at any given time.
  • Malcolm Holcombe, the brilliant and enigmatic songwriter whom Lucinda Williams called “an old soul and a modern-day blues poet” has died at 68 years old, after a battle with cancer and a late-life surge of creative fire. He passed away on Saturday near where he was raised in western North Carolina, but Holcombe jolted his way into the consciousness of many roots music lovers and practitioners during a spell in Nashville 25 years ago. In a music community characterized by polite songwriter rounds, Holcombe was unnervingly ferocious and feral - a mesmerizing performer and lyricist whose mix of gifts and demons invite worthy comparisons to Hank Williams and Townes VanZandt.
  • In the 1990s, Paul Burch was among the pioneer artists who brought legit country music and old-school Music City values to Lower Broadway’s honky tonks. In the years since, he’s been an admired songwriter and performer while branching into scoring and production. Now he puts on yet another hat as he joins Middle Tennessee State University’s Center For Popular Music (CPM) as the manager of its non-profit, in-house label Spring Fed Records.