Formed in Dallas in 1992, Old 97’s became one of the seminal bands of the alternative country movement, alongside Whiskeytown, Son Volt, the Bottle Rockets and BR549. At its heart was the longtime friendship of bass player Murry Hammond and guitarist/songwriter Rhett Miller. Remarkably, across 13 albums and millions of miles, Old 97’s remains the same quartet that broke out on Bloodshot Records three decades ago. They’re still having fun and keeping company with their large base of lifelong fans. Craig made a field trip to Lexington, KY this summer to catch a show and sit down with Miller to talk about the long road and the newest album American Primitive.

Many of you have joined us for Roots On The Rivers, our boutique summer festival at the historic Two Rivers Mansion. For three years running, we’ve welcomed slates of exceptional artists from across the Americana spectrum to play nice, long sets on a great-sounding stage. The setting - the grounds of a 150-year-old antebellum home built by one of Nashville’s founding fathers - is relaxed, shady and ideal for our community to gather, converse, listen, and meet the artists. But what you don’t know, dear radio friends, is that behind the scenes at this year’s ROTR, on June 1, while the likes of Elizabeth Cook, Devon Gilfillian and Chatham County Line rocked the main stage, our crack audio/video crew produced a parallel, private concert.

The conversation about Black influence on and presence in country music has been intense and restorative over the past decade, and nobody has a more authoritative or informed take on the subject than writer and scholar Alice Randall. She became the first Black woman to launch a career as a professional Music Row songwriter and publisher in the 1980s. She’s shared her incredible journey in her new memoir My Black Country, while a multi-artist collection of the same title features a dozen leading Black female voices in Americana singing her songs. Craig Havighurst visited Alice at her home to talk about it all.

Episode 292 of The String begins, as any introduction to Madeleine Peyroux should, with the story of Careless Love. Released in 2004, it became the pivotal album of her international career. Its fresh and beguiling blend of jazz, early blues, and country influences fell between the industry’s proverbial cracks, yet the album became a hit in a dozen countries, selling more than a half million copies (hard to do in the new digital age) for its roots-centered label Rounder Records. Peyroux’s voice and phrasing, with echoes of Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell, had more verve than the newly famous Norah Jones and more blues than Diana Krall. Her story was more remarkable than either.

On Wednesday, WMOT, Middle Tennessee’s radio home for Americana music, opened its first satellite radio studio and performance space at Riverside Revival in East Nashville. The long-held dream of a Nashville creative hub is being made possible through a partnership with the Boedecker Foundation. The studios are now operational from the foundation’s Collaborative Campus at 1600 Riverside Drive.

Since its founding in 2002, FloydFest has brought eclectic and excellent music and family-friendly arts programming to the hills of southwest Virginia. Recently, after outgrowing their first home on a gorgeous plateau, the team decided to make a long-term investment, purchasing 200 acres nearby and moving their operation to a picturesque holler, for the first time officially in Floyd County. I’d been planning on visiting for years and finally made it work, and I found a rich culture and a beguiling mix of top-shelf Americana, trippy jam bands, instrumental excellence, and old-time folk drawn from the town of Floyd and surrounding counties. Here’s my report.

Thirty years into her late-blooming music career, Kim Richey feels like Americana music’s favorite aunt. She’s hip, youthful, incredibly kind and brimming with ideas and good words, much of which makes it into fresh songs. She’s been co-writing a good bit lately, with the likes of Don Henry, Ashley Campbell and Aaron Lee Tasjan. New work mingled with unrecorded catalog, hand-picked with producer Doug Lancio, led to her first new LP in six years, Every New Beginning.

In a bit more than a decade in Nashville, Kyshona has become a figure respected for her wisdom and valued as a songwriter/artist. Her 2020 album Listen, released just before the Covid shutdown, captured the zeitgeist of that troubled and strangely inspiring year, in part because a key part of the artist’s background and calling is music therapy. Her ethos of continuity and community continues on the magnificent album Legacy, where her research into her family history blossoms into songs that draw from soul, folk and gospel. This is a wide ranging talk with a woman who approaches all that she does with a desire and a plan to leave the world a bit wiser and kinder than she found it.

Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and a certain family named McCoury retained their dominant spots atop bluegrass music with multiple nominations for the 35th annual International Bluegrass Music Association Awards, which were announced Wednesday in Nashville. At the same time, fast-emerging bands East Nash Grass and AJ Lee & Blue Summit made surprising inroads with nominations in major categories as well as New Artist of the Year. The all-woman band Sister Sadie also stood out with eight total nominations, including for top Entertainer, Album, Song, Vocal Group, Female Vocalist, and Music Video, as well as nods in two instrumentalist categories.

In a nation beset by disinformation and division, Oklahoma country soul artist Jared Deck has taken his truth, quite deliberately, to the nexus of music and politics. While writing and recording his latest album, he also marched his faith in progressive ideas and civil process to the public stage of the statehouse in Oklahoma City as a Democratic representative from district 44. The crabby “shut up and sing” crowd simply won’t know what to do with him.