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I always feel fulfilled and very much at home when I visit western North Carolina, the place where I first spent nights in the woods, first rafted on whitewater rivers, and first heard Doc Watson. I grew up in the central Piedmont region of the state, but those Smoky Mountains always felt close by, and in the years I’ve been on the music beat, my relationship with the area in and around Asheville has only grown richer and more rewarding. One big reason is Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters.

Decades after it came out in 1979, you still regularly hear “Romeo’s Tune” by Steve Forbert over PAs in the grocery store or on oldies radio if that’s what you’re into. But don’t let that early hit define Forbert’s long, distinguished career. He’s an excellent and widely admired songwriter with more than 20 albums to his credit. He dropped by Craig’s home studio to talk about his mindset moving from his hometown Meridian, MS to New York in the 1970s, on up to his latest record, Moving Through America.

Blue Highway, the legendary band from East Tennessee, has plenty of songs about the Blue Ridge Mountains but now they’ve got one about the Himalayas. “On The Roof Of The World” was inspired, says songwriter and guitarist Tim Stafford, by the landscape and people of the Tibetan Plateau, where Sherpas live and die on expeditions to Mt. Everest. It’s a great tune with a unique twist. So what else could we do but pair it with the Country Gentlemen singing of mountaineers in “Matterhorn,” in a live performance from 1972. Other new music comes from Maya De Vitry, Shannon Wright, and Chicago’s Special Consensus. Trey Wellington brings hot instrumental bluegrass from Black Banjo, while Bill Evans and Fletcher bright team up with Norman and Nancy Blake for an old-time standard. Keep climbing.

We love hearing stories of folks raised overseas who became fascinated and then dedicated to American traditional music, whether German born songwriter Thomm Jutz or guitar maestro Beppe Gambetta from Italy. Another Italian who came to the US in search of a sound is fiddler, banjo player, singer and instrument maker Rafe Stefanini. Since his move in the 1980s, the Bologna native became a staple on the old time circuit, working out of a base in Pennsylvania. But recently he moved to Madison, TN, and we were lucky enough to present him with his family band at Dee’s in June. And you can hear some tracks from that set in episode #21 of The Old Fashioned.

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.