Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott

They had already written together: Garth Brooks recorded their song “When There’s No One Around” on his No. 1 album Sevens (1997). Scott, born in London, Kentucky, in 1959, had moved to Nashville in 1992 as a session musician, and O’Brien moved there in 1996, starting his own label, Howdy Skies, in 1998.

Their first duo album, Real Time, was released in 2000 on Howdy Skies with Sugar Hill, and included “Little Sadie,” “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burnin’” and “A House of Gold”; its instrumental “The Second Mouse” was nominated for the 2001 Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance.

In 2005 and 2006 the two played benefit concerts at the Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, for the Arthur Morgan School, which their children attended, and recorded them. The result, We’re Usually a Lot Better Than This, came out on Scott’s Full Light label on 9 October 2012: mostly songs by roots-music figures they admired, such as “Early Morning Rain” and “White Freightliner Blues,” with a few originals, including “When There’s No One Around” joined to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” It reached No. 3 on the Billboard bluegrass albums chart. The studio album they announced with it, Memories and Moments, followed in 2013 and went to No. 2 on the bluegrass chart and No. 9 on the Heatseekers chart, and that year they appeared together on Mountain Stage.