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In a casual, expansive conversation, Craig visits with his old friend Eric Brace, founder of alt-country band Last Train Home. Brace was a music journalist for the Washington Post when he formed the Washington, DC-based group in the mid 1990s. Then in the early 2000s, he and the rhythm section moved to Nashville, where LTH found a new life and Brace branched out as a label owner with Red Beet Records, which documented the rising East Nashville music scene. Brace has continued to tour with small acoustic groups, but Last Train Home keeps releasing albums, most recently 2022's Everything Will Be.

Lera Lynn takes pride in approaching each of her albums with a different plan, and she’s done a bang up job of that in recent years. 2018’s Plays Well With Others found her co-writing and co-singing duets with a range of friends in a Florence, AL studio. In 2020 she went in exactly the opposite direction with On My Own, featuring tracks she composed, played, recorded and mixed by herself at home. Paradoxically, that deliberate self-isolation came in 2019 before we were all isolated and staying at home. But by then, Lynn had a new situation altogether - she was a new mother, recording her new Something More Than Love between her maternal obligations.

Americana music is full of conversion stories - artists who didn’t grow up amid the traditions they inhabit but who, like Paul on the road to Damascus, experienced a revelation. Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch discovered country and bluegrass music as young adults and made it their own, in two famous examples. Cristina Vane had a similar epiphany, but she had to travel farther to manifest it.

The story of Black American Music is more deeply woven into bluegrass and string band music than many people appreciate, but it’s something we’ve been catching up on in a big way in the last few years. So we wanted to mark Black History Month with an hour of blues, old-time, Creole, and contemporary folk from a range of artists old and new. More than usual, we proceed chronologically from the foundational jug band music of the Mississippi Sheiks and the legendary “Last Kind Word Blues” by Geeshie Wiley through more modern expressions of traditional music. The show landed in tandem with Mardis Gras, so we hear some zydeco from Boozoo Chavis. And in Dom Flemons, Amythyst Kiah, Tui, and Tray Wellington, we hear the best from today’s African American trad music world.

We’re once again putting the “new” in The Old Fashioned with fresh, hot singles and cuts from cutting edge albums in the bluegrass and old-time space. We get things started with Jeremy Garrett’s “What’s That You’re Doing” from his album River Wild, a chart-topping tune with drive and emotion from the fiddling Infamous Stringduster. We also offer up the first of what will surely be many cuts from young Jaelee Roberts, a rising MTSU senior who’s just released her debut album Something You Didn’t Count On. It’s a highly recommended album, and be aware that she’s part of the new lineup for IBMA Entertainers of the Year Sister Sadie. Quite a voice! I nearly forgot to mention this show’s three-song set from Nashville’s own Casey Campbell and friends, playing as the Johnson & Johnson Mountain Boys (ha ha) for our first live TOF event at Dee’s Lounge not many weeks ago. Classic tracks from Missy Raines, Patty Loveless and Gillian Welch add to the character of episode 12, and we hope you love it all.

You’ve probably heard the theory, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, that there’s a magic threshold of 10,000 hours of cumulative practice that fosters excellence and success among artists, athletes and other purveyors of a craft. So maybe it’s not as true as social scientists once thought, but it is certainly intuitive that if a band was able to play live for people nearly every day for up to ten hours at a time, over years, that they’d grow tighter, sharper and more attuned to one another. It sure feels true with the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys.

There haven’t been more than a handful of repeat guests on The String in these six years, but with Mary Gauthier it’s a no-brainer. She’s one of the most interesting figures in Nashville - a philosopher of song and a gifted teacher and speaker. A 2021 memoir allowed her to lay her remarkable story out end to end, mingling memoir with songwriting insights and laying bare her vulnerabilities and struggles. A new album ruminates on new love and the loss of friends with radical empathy.

Amy hosts solo this week, so there’s a heavy old-time and trad folk vibe to Show #22. The very new Tall Poppy String Band features our pal George Jackson from Nashville with Portland, OR banjo player Cameron DeWhitt and Mark Harris of Fort Collins, CO on guitar. Also new is a beguiling rendition of an ancient tune called “Sixteen Kings’ Daughters” by versatile Nashville musician Libby Weitnauer. On the folk frontier, the fast-rising Willi Carlisle offers his original Tex Mex ballad “Este Mundo” and we hear vintage sound from Taj Mahal and the late great zydeco master Boozoo Chavis.

One of the coolest young ensembles that Amy Alvey has brought to the Old Fashioned record collection this year is Sinner Friends, the duo of multi-instrumentalists Grace van't Hof and Conner Vlietstra. Grace was a founder of Della Mae, a keen voice in Bill & The Belles and the banjo player in Chris Jones and the Night Drivers. Conner is still finishing his degree at ETSU but he’s been in old time music all his life. Together, they channel the Bailes Brothers and the Carter Family while adding something punky and today to their close harmonies. We’ve played them before but this week their single “Unforgivable You” anchors our first set. Also in the hour, new singles from from Woody Platt, who’s on his way out the door as frontman of the Steep Canyon Rangers, Appalachian Road Show and Riverbend. Bronwyn Keith-Hines fiddles magnificently in “North Garden.” Our lookback tracks come from the Osborne Brothers and Mac Wiseman, the Seldom Scene and the Bluegrass Album Band.

The International Bluegrass Music Association announced the nominees for the 33rd annual IBMA Awards on July 26, offering a look at the top tiers of the genre as we enter the fall of 2022. So we decided to devote this hour to as many of the nominees as we could squeeze in. Certainly Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle were going to be front and center with six nominations each. Our surprise guy was Rick Faris from Topeka, KS, whose been on our mind to play for a while anyway, because he’s an excellent singer, writer and guitar player. Other key voices include Danny Paisley and Dale Ann Bradley. The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys are in the hunt for Entertainer of the Year. Hot Instrumental performances come from Bela Fleck and Scott Vestal. And for our historic moments we tapped newly announced hall of famers Norman Blake and Peter Rowan. You can read our news coverage of the event and see a full list of nominees here.