The String
Mondays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 a.m.
The String is where history and music meet on WMOT Roots Radio. Each week, veteran radio journalist Craig Havighurst hosts extended conversations with today’s finest music makers, songwriters, producers and storytellers. Over nine years, Craig has interviewed a who’s who of American music - Rodney Crowell, Buddy and Julie Miller, Margo Price, Dom Flemons, Rosanne Cash, the McCrary Sisters and many more - with plenty of music highlights to illustrate their epic careers.
The String airs Mondays at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 am. Show note features are published on WMOT.org, and every episode is distributed across all major podcast platforms. Find the complete archive of shows here.
Latest Episodes
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Since breaking out with his 1989 major-label album How Did You Find Me Here, North Carolina’s David Wilcox has been a consistently excellent practitioner of the new folk, fingerstyle guitar arts. The songwriter, known for his empathic writing and audience-embracing shows, is now 67 and still thinking deep thoughts about the world, compassion, art, and the arc of life. He stopped through Nashville last November to talk about maintaining a “visionary attitude” over time and his latest album The Way I Tell The Story. -
For its 38th annual conference, Folk Alliance International returned to New Orleans, home of their largest-ever event (2020’s draw of 3,600 people) and the epicenter of one of the nation’s great regional roots music legacies. Besides a slate of Louisiana talent in blues, Cajun and zydeco, FAI was once again distinguished by diversity of style, genre, and nationality. Craig captured conversations with showcasing artists Joy Clark, Tyler Ramsey & Carl Broemel, Sparrow Smith, Maisy Owen, and Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light. -
Kristina Train is a singer and songwriter who should be on more people’s radar. Her remarkable resume was built in the jazz world (Blue Note Records and touring with Herbie Hancock), but the Savannah, GA native has always shown a seductive strain of country soul. That goes explicit on the powerful yet subtle 2025 album County Line. Craig speaks with Train about her critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s and her decade or so as a Nashvillian. -
Rachael Price became an American fixture as the dynamic and flawless lead singer of roots/pop phenomenon Lake Street Dive. Long before she and the Dive were headlining Madison Square Garden, she was a Hendersonville, TN native pursuing a career in classic jazz, after her girlhood idol Ella Fitzgerald. This is the story of how a music school friend - guitarist, singer, and songwriter Vilray - helped her build a parallel life pursuing her first musical love. They have incredible chemistry on and off stage, as you’ll hear in this fascinating interview. -
To say that a lot has happened since Molly Tuttle last appeared on The String in 2019 would be an understatement. She’s won two Grammy Awards and been nominated for two more. She won her first IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Award, to go along with her two groundbreaking Guitar Player trophies. But most important, she’s been through two entire stylistic swings in her musical vision and recording career. And she got engaged to Ketch Secor. So we cover a lot of ground in our latest conversation. -
Last year, The String got a new opening theme tune. “Vera” comes from New York based mandolin virtuoso, composer and band leader Jacob Jolliff. The Oregon native came East when he got a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. He’s worked for some big-league bands including Joy Kills Sorrow and Yonder Mountain String Band, but in this decade he’s found an audience for his own four-piece Jacob Jolliff Band. We talk about building the audience for instrumental, improvisational acoustic music and about select pieces from Jake’s fascinating discography. -
Ashley Monroe moved to Nashville just after 10th grade from East Tennessee with a single-minded drive to sing and write country music. Her career would be the envy of many - including Grammy nominations, several major label albums, and Pistol Annies, an influential supergroup - and yet many in roots music haven’t recognized her as among the greats of our time. Following recovery from blood cancer, Monroe reached deep into herself, producing her most ambitious and daring project yet, Tennessee Lightning. -
Her name is made of flowers. And she’s been spreading bouquets of joy and open-hearted country and rockabilly for more than 50 years. She is Rosie Flores, sounding great and enjoying the stage as much as she ever has as she cruised past her 75th birthday during Americanafest 2025. A couple days after that, we sat down to talk about her (outstandingly) supportive parents, the Los Angeles alt-country scene of the 1980s and 90s, and her new album Impossible Frontiers. -
Daniel Donato became one of Nashville’s more revered electric guitar players during his three years playing four nights a week at Robert’s Western World on Lower Broadway. When he lost that gig in 2015, he had to start from scratch as a working musician and songwriting artist. In his second appearance on The String, Donato talks about landing some touring band gigs that sustained him while he developed his Cosmic Country concept. The band and his repute grew, and ten years after leaving Broadway, he headlined the Ryman Auditorium. Also on the table here, his two recent albums, Reflector and Horizons. -
Since co-founding the history-making, history-preserving North Mississippi Allstars almost 30 years ago, Luther Dickinson has taken his guitar, his deep blues repertoire, and his Memphis soul around the world and into all kinds of collaborations. In his latest return to The String, we talk about the nature of improvising and some of his recent experimental and instrumental projects, plus the 2025 Allstars album Still Rollin’, marking the 25th anniversary of the band’s debut album.
