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Featuring Heather Little, Lance Roark & Stephanie Sammons.

Featuring The Volcano Brothers, Crystal Rose & Alice Wallace.

Featuring Maya De Vitry, Muriel Anderson & Helena Hallberg.

January 6 was the 100th birthday of Earl Scruggs, an event marked with a superb multi-artist concert at the Ryman Auditorium. Others are taking the centenary a few steps farther onto records and stages, and no one can do that for Earl with more thought and authority than Tony Trischka. We’ve been previewing his album Earl Jam for weeks, but now it’s here, a 15-song set inspired by a collection of home recordings from picking sessions by Earl and John Hartford that Trischka got hold of. With many top tier musicians and guests, it’s an inspiring and affectionate tribute. Also this week, a surprising new single from eccentric country soul artist Swamp Dogg, a superb cover of “Sixteen Tons” by Clay Hess, a take on The Band’s “Stage Fright” by fellow Canadians the Lonesome Ace String Band, and a call-in from Amy Alvey about her time at the Fire on the Mountain Festival in Wales.

Featuring Connor Daly, Grace Pettis & Emily Earle.

Featuring Monte Warden, Piper & The Hard Times and Sydney Sleadd

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.

Featuring Martha Spencer, Call Me Spinster & Madeleine Kelson

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.

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.