Hayes Carll is such an admired veteran of the Texas songwriting tradition that his visage is painted on a sign along with Townes Van Zandt at the Old Quarter Cafe in Galveston. Over ten albums, he’s matched cleverness with insight and tenderness with roadhouse rock and roll. In this self-effacing interview, Carll talks about his apprentice years at that storied bar, his adjustments after being signed to a Music Row label, and his vulnerable new album We’re Only Human.

After a three-year tutelage with Old Crow Medicine Show, multi-faceted Appalachian artist Mason Via has set out on his own road. He was raised in bluegrass festival campgrounds and at picking parties hosted by his dad, songwriter and musician David Via. Bluegrass royalty hung out at his home near the North Carolina/Virginia border, and it’s rubbed off. After trying a few musical directions, Via’s self-titled album of this year shows range, depth, and a command of bluegrass and country moods. Meet a 28-year-old you’ll be hearing a lot more about if you follow acoustic roots.

Few fully independent artists in any genre have been able to grow to the scale and influence that Cody Jinks has pulled off in the outlaw country space. He sells out iconic venues like Red Rocks in Colorado with a sound that layers his boyhood influence from Lefty Frizzell with the edge of the thrash metal rocker he once was. The Fort Worth native “put in the reps” for countless years in bars and honky tonks, nearly going broke, before albums like I’m Not The Devil and Lifers vaulted him to the big time in the years before the pandemic. He’s now out with In My Blood, an album that basks in his newfound sobriety and a new focus on himself and his family, making this a very candid and fascinating interview with a self-made country star whom mainstream radio virtually overlooks.

While it’s one of the great music cities in the world, the story of Memphis, TN is generally told as one about Elvis, BB King, Isaac Hayes, and possibly Justin Timberlake - artists from the history books or well on in their careers. Roots music fans might know more contemporary talents like songwriters Amy LaVere and John Paul Keith. Many others simmer along in that city’s bars and clubs, but one has to go there to get up to speed on the talent pool. Southern Avenue is different - a breakout band from Bluff City with national acclaim, a renowned record label, and a musical voice grounded in native soil and native soul. It’s the band today’s Memphis has needed.

To hear Mike Farris sing - an experience a bit like being pinned to the seat of an accelerating Porsche Taycan - is to believe that he was born to the stage, motivated from childhood, and destined for soul/gospel glory. Yet in Episode 327 of The String, we learn that A) Mike is lucky to be here at all and B) that a singing career was not remotely on his own radar until he was approaching his 20th birthday. And the two are related. In his teens, Farris almost died from drug abuse. Music was part of his rescue. And I’ve never heard him go as deep on these subjects as he does in this hour. His newest album is a powerful, secular record recorded at FAME Studios called The Sound Of Muscle Shoals.

Andrea Zonn and John Cowan have a few years under their belts as co-lead vocalists in the Nashville supergroup The HercuLeons, and now they have a debut album to complement their regular shows at 3rd & Lindsley. Given that they have significant touring commitments with superstar bands The Doobie Brothers (Cowan) and James Taylor (Zonn), they’ve done well to corral this assembly of musicians and songs. They’re both Music City veterans with rich stories to tell, so we’ve given them each their own episode of The String.

It’s hard to believe that Nashville’s SteelDrivers have been making their unique brand of hard-core string band music for nearly twenty years. They were the vehicle through which many of us were introduced to the epic voice of Chris Stapleton, back when he and Mike Henderson co-wrote that band’s high impact debut album of 2008. When Henderson and Stapleton had to move on, the band pulled its greatest trick, growing bigger and building a legacy that’s like nothing else in 21st century bluegrass. In Episode 324 of The String, Craig talks with original members Mike Fleming, bass player and baritone vocal, and Tammy Rogers, the fiddler and harmony singer who now leads the way with the band’s songwriting. We talk about the whole ride, up to the new album Outrun, out now on a revived Sun Records.

The story of how global banjo explorer Joe Troop (formerly of Che Apalache) met Venezuelan harpist and all-around folk music master Larry Bellorín is testimony to the magic of global culture and a cautionary tale about the stark turn US policy has taken against working asylum seekers this year. Over three years as the bilingual, genre-fusing, and multi-instrumental duo Larry & Joe, they’ve toured widely and made two albums together to great acclaim among folk music lovers. They’re one of the most charismatic and culture-crossing acts to come out of roots music in the past decade. Here in a special episode of The String, they tell their story in an interview that took place in Knoxville, TN in March.

This episode of The String is a field report from the city that raised me in the 1970s and 80s and gave me my foundation in music, from college rock radio, to youth orchestra at Duke University, to jazz tutelage at a Black Muslim community center. It’s an arts-forward city that in the past decade has become something of a magnet for roots music, building on a history of gospel, blues and string band music, while the new festival Biscuits & Banjos, curated by Rhiannon Giddens, has put itself in a position to be a bridge from the past to the future and give Durham the identity it’s lacked as a national music hotspot.

Texas songwriter Vincent Neil Emerson graduated from playing on the streets and in the bars of Fort Worth to tours with Colter Wall and American Aquarium and then a well-received debut album (2019’s Fried Chicken And Evil Women). That inspired none other than Rodney Crowell and Shooter Jennings in turn to take an interest in producing the young country troubadour, resulting in a self-titled release in 2021 and the more recent The Golden Crystal Kingdom of 2023. They heard what I hear - an artist processing his past and making his struggles universal, a singer with an honest voice and a distinct point of view. He paused during his ongoing touring to sit down with WMOT after a show at Skinny Dennis.