On Tuesday, Sept. 16, leaders and insiders in the bluegrass music community piled into a ballroom at the Chattanooga Convention Center, excited to hear a keynote interview with the genre’s biggest star, Billy Strings. The Q&A format is a kind of fallback position when a high-profile figure isn’t thought to be an experienced or enthusiastic public speaker. But that afternoon, Billy Strings surprised the organizers. He did have an address. He wanted the podium. And over about 13 minutes, the Grammy-winning guitar player, singer, songwriter and bandleader, so renowned for his touring success, made a different kind of roots music history.
Since emerging as bluegrass music’s most potent touring act of the modern era, the genre’s supporters and believers have treated Strings like a Rorschach test. We discussed “The Billy Strings Effect” on the larger scene. We projected meaning and import on a then-twentysomething guy who seemed to have infinite energy, devotion to his art and his band, and some kind of mission to support and spread bluegrass music. But last week, more than ever before, he made that purpose public and explicit.
“As time goes on, I realize that I have a duty here to play (traditional) songs for the next generation,” he said, as quoted in my report last week on the IBMA Awards. He spoke of inspiring young people to search out the music of his own influences - Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, and Earl Scruggs. Later in the Q&A, he concluded the session by saying “I'm stoked to see my peers and people that I grew up picking with out there on a big stage doing good work, you know? And, yeah, it's my honor and duty to wave that flag as high and wide as I can. Like I said, that's my whole purpose, I think in life, you know? I'm a father now. That's kind of taken the first spot, but behind that, I'm an ambassador of this music.”
Strings brought more than a mission statement. He spoke with eloquence and vulnerability about how bluegrass music took hold of his imagination as a youth living in a troubled home with drug-addicted parents - and how its themes of bygone halcyon days and lonesome blues have resonated with him at the deepest level. “Throughout my adolescence, I would experience hardships that contributed to my own melancholy, and I quickly learned that these scars and painful memories of childhood and lonesome thoughts of home are some of the main ingredients for bluegrass music,” he said. “The fortunate flip side of that is that I also learned how bluegrass music can be the only cure for those painful, everlasting memories. It can be a powerful medicine.”
Strings also found elegant words about veering off into rock and metal as a young teenager looking for some kind of escape from his displacement and alienation. “It was fun and everything, but it just didn't give me that deja vu that bluegrass does. It didn't give me that feeling that could make me laugh or cry or bring me back to my childhood before I knew anything dirty about the Earth. I realized that bluegrass is where my heart and soul is, and from that point, I decided to go back to it, and here I have stayed.”
In the interview that followed, with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. host Tom Power, Strings moved the crowd when speaking about how his drive and ambition took shape as he transitioned from an old-time duo with Michigan mandolinist Don Julin to the Billy Strings Band and a more expansive musical palette when he moved to Nashville in the 2010s. “I just had this burning ‘I'll show you’ kind of thing, like, I'm gonna take this thing to the stratosphere, and nothing's gonna stop me,” Strings said. “Also, I don't want to go back to where I was, to the poverty and the substance abuse and sleeping in a winter coat, sleeping with a dog that has fleas, and going across the house and getting in the shower and drying off with a towel that smells like mildew, you know? And not having hot water anyways, or electricity. I didn't want to go back to that, and I still don't. I'm running from that. I'm not running towards success. I'm running away from poverty.”
Over the next few days, the keynote was the talk of World of Bluegrass. Several people told me they were moved by Billy’s stark yet inspiring depiction of a life journey that so many country musicians know so intimately.
Banjo player and prominent bluegrass broadcaster Ned Lubereki told me he appreciated that Strings championed open minds and open hearts when it comes to evolving styles or manners in bluegrass, even in a self-deprecating way. “My favorite part was not only his admission that he didn’t particularly care for jamgrass when he first heard it, but more importantly that it was because he didn’t yet understand it,” Luberecki said. “I think that’s true for a lot of folks. Also, his metaphor about bluegrassers being ‘like crabs in a bucket, trying to pull each other down’ seemed right on target. The success of artists like Billy, Greensky Bluegrass, and the Infamous Stringdusters is not harming the success of (trad-leaning bands) The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys or Joe Mullins. Quite the opposite. The rising tide lifts all boats.”
Hall of Famer Doyle Lawson, a strong believer in decorum and sartorial presentation, told me he was impressed by Billy’s comportment, his message, and his sportcoat.
Strings speak and run either. He hung around the convention center through the week, visiting with people and playing guitar. His enthusiasm was palpable when he sang a duet with bluegrass elder Paul Williams and played the late Jimmy Martin’s guitar. After missing collecting his Entertainer of the Year prizes in his past three years of winning, Strings attended the award show, playing on stage and accepting his fourth top trophy on his own behalf.
It helped that the opening days of World of Bluegrass coincided with two nights of Billy Strings live in Chattanooga at separate, unaffiliated shows - one night with his incendiary bluegrass band and the other as the last night of a tour pairing Strings with his acoustic guitar hero and peer Bryan Sutton in an intimate showcase of singing and picking.
I was able to catch that duo show last Monday night - here at the Ryman Auditorium. And it put into practice what Billy would preach the next afternoon. Strings and Sutton share a foundational inspiration in the music and repertoire of North Carolina folk icon Doc Watson (1923-2012). This summer’s run of shows, piggybacking off their April album Live At The Legion (East Nashville’s Post 82), featured Doc songs and Doc styles of musicianship, including fingerstyle blues, slide guitar, frailing banjo, and hot flatpicking. Backed by bass player Royal Masat, Strings and Sutton captivated and electrified an audience (some of whom had paid thousands of scalper dollars to get in) with a setlist of 1920s radio hits, old British ballads, sentimental songs, country blues, and a spectacular, roof-raising take on Gershwin’s “Summertime” with lead vocals by guest mandolinist Sam Bush. It was something to see a stomping, shouting standing ovation for the Great American Songbook, but such is the power of a hip, modern artist embracing the past for real, with high standards and empathy, and carrying it forward.
Billy Strings, who is about to turn 33, is pulling off his genre-transcending, genre-preserving trick amid one of the most intense periods of his life. He married his longtime companion Ally Dale two Septembers ago, and they had a son one year later. Late this June, Strings’s mother died in what he revealed was a drug overdose, yet he performed in Lexington, KY that night, dedicating the show to her. Strings went into this in some remarkable depth in another recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. He also told interviewer Sam Briger, about his brutally difficult childhood and about what he describes as constant, nagging anxiety. “I’m doing okay, but It’s a daily struggle to just stay on the ground,” he said.
We’ve enjoyed the music for years, but in the space of the last few months, we’ve come to know this man better. We can root for and support his music and his mission in new ways. Bluegrass and acoustic folk music are bulwarks against the scourge of AI-generated tracks and soporific “layback” tracks-for-hire being insinuated into streaming playlists. I’ve loved bluegrass music for almost 40 years, and it’s had a series of patriarch figures like Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury. Now it has a contemporary champion and crossover star who’s boosting the music with the style and musicianship to widen the market, and the historic foundation to keep it real.
Watch the full Billy Strings keynote address and interview here:
