Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton

Sutton, born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1973, had been a Nashville session guitarist, a member of Ricky Skaggs’s Kentucky Thunder and of Hot Rize, and ten times the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year. Strings, born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1992, had come up in a duo with the mandolinist Don Julin before leading his own band, and by 2024 had been named the IBMA’s Entertainer of the Year three times and won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album with Home. Strings has called Sutton a “huge inspiration” as a guitarist, and the two had played together often before the album. At Strings’s Ryman Auditorium show on 6 May 2022, for instance, Sutton came out for a short duo set between the band’s sets, playing “Beaumont Rag,” Bill Monroe’s “I’m Coming Back but I Don’t Know When,” Strings’s “Salty Sheep,” “Tom Dooley” and Doc Watson’s “Way Downtown.”

Post 82, in the Inglewood section of Nashville, has long hosted bluegrass and uses the money it raises from live music to help area veterans. Live at the Legion holds twenty traditional bluegrass and folk songs and fiddle tunes, with Masat on bass. Much of the set leans on music associated with Doc Watson, Tony Rice and Clarence White, and it also takes in Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a song by Blaze Foley, and Norman Blake’s “Randall Collins” paired with the old-time “Done Gone.” It appeared on streaming services on 7 April 2025, the anniversary of the show, and on CD and double vinyl on 1 August.

The trio run that followed played seven shows: two nights at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum’s Woodward Theatre in Owensboro, Kentucky, from 5 September 2025, two at the Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, two at the Ryman Auditorium on 14 and 15 September, and a closing night at the Signal in Chattanooga on 16 September. Tickets were sold by lottery. The opening night ran largely through Watson’s repertoire, from “Way Downtown” and “Beaumont Rag” to “Give Me Back My Fifteen Cents” and “Streamlined Cannonball,” with the Carter Family’s “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” and in the second set Strings switched to clawhammer banjo for “Frosty Morn” and “The Cuckoo.” Strings also plays on Sutton’s duets album From Roots to Branches, Vol. 1 (Mountain Home, 2026).