Chattanooga, TN is becoming a key autumn stop on the never-ending Billy Strings road show. After wowing attendees at last year's World of Bluegrass witha history-making keynote address, the star guitarist and singer came back to the city this week to play shows in a newly renovated Tivoli Theater (with live video pumped onto the street for the public). And on Thursday night, he locked up his fifth Entertainer of the Year prize (in six years) at the 37th annual IBMA Awards.
After thanking his band and his professional team, Strings invoked bluegrass history as the source of his energy. "I want to thank Bill Monroe and Doc Watson and Jimmy Martin and Larry Sparks and the Osborne Brothers and all my heroes who have gone on before, and the ones that are still here today: Bryan Sutton, Sam Bush, David Grisman - all the guys I look up to. A lot of y'all are sitting right out here. And for all the inspiration, you know, as a kid, hearing this music and just kind of having a dream in my head - and now I get to go do that. So it means the absolute world to me, and I thank you all so much for this great honor."
While nobody was surprised to see the arena-filling Strings claim the night's top prize, it perhaps defied the Polymarket speculators when East Nash Grass won the night's other high-prestige prize, Album of the Year. Nominees included Sister Sadie's highly regarded All Will Be Well, a deeply personal Songs That Sing Me by multi-IBMA star Becky Buller, and other excellent LPs. But East Nash Grass, the product of a long Monday night residency at Dee's Lounge in Madison, swooped in to claim the award with its grooving, economical (29-minute) 2025 album All God's Children.
Before Thursday, East Nash Grass had won only a single IBMA Award - 2024's New Artist of the Year. But this time the band also took the coveted Instrumental Group Of The Year award, recognizing the mandolin of Harry Clark, the fiddle of Maddie Denton, the banjo of Cory Walker, and the guitar of Frank Rische. The quartet was on the road playing a show in Washington, DC, but their co-founding singer/guitarist James Kee, who is on the album but who retired from the band this year to stay closer to family in Nashville, was on hand to accept both awards.
In his remarks, Kee made a connection I've been making for years about the historic echoes between East Nash Grass's chill yet masterful approach and the iconic Nashville Bluegrass Band, whose members were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame on Thursday as well.
"I always looked up to the Nashville Bluegrass Band so much growing up, and I always thought they were the model example of what to be. Man, those guys were so awesome,” Kee said. He quoted the NBB's founder who'd spoken just minutes before as he accepted induction. "Alan O'Bryant said it best: when you've been hugged by the arms of this bluegrass community, it means the world. So thank you."
This year's New Artist award went to gangly and gregarious Mason Via, a Nashville-based North Carolinian who's brought spirit and a old-time country inflection to his acoustic Americana music since parting ways with Old Crow Medicine Show two years ago. On stage, Via thanked the band "who mentored me...I'm grateful for my time with them." His most recent album is a self-titled 2025 collection, and his recent singles have taken him in a populist direction, with the environmental anthem "See It While You Can (National Parks Song)" and a cover, with Lucinda Williams, of Woody Guthrie's "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)".
An important and overdue first award reached multi-instrumentalist Andy Leftwich, whose fiddle and mandolin playing has dazzled the industry for 20 years. “I’ve waited for this for so long,” he said. My award for funniest and most tearful acceptance line of the night came from MTSU grad and Sister Sadie singer Jaelee Roberts. Gushing about her second Female Vocalist of the Year prize in three years, the 25-year-old said, “If you’d told me this would happen when I was 19, I’d have told you that you were cray-cray. Literally.”
Cody Kilby (super-picker with the Travelin’ McCourys) won Guitar Player of the Year for the third time, seemingly potent in even number years since he’d already won in 2022 and 2024. Watch out in 2028!. Mike Bub, one of the most renowned and respected sidemen in bluegrass, took his sixth Bass Player Of The Year award, but it was his first in 20 years, so the crowd went wild and he choked up in his acceptance speech.
The awards show, hosted by multi-generational mandolin pairing of Sam Bush and Sierra Hull, featured some emotion-packed performances, given the recent deaths of Dolly Parton and star singer/songwriter Ronnie Bowman. The Del McCoury Band performed their classic “I Feel The Blues Moving In,” because Dolly cut it. The Grascals remembered Bowman with his mournful gospel composition “Three Rusty Nails.” The show ended with a joyously received walk-on performance by country star and Kentucky music icon Patty Loveless.
Besides the Nashville Bluegrass Band, three other figures were enshrined in the Hall of Fame: Sugar Hill Records founder Barry Poss, five-decade band The Lost & Found, and the late great fiddler Byron Berline.
