On a Friday night in February 2024, in Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, the second set opened with a man alone on a stool at the front of the stage, playing banjo. He was Béla Fleck, and the piece was his own “Jazz Odyssey.” When the night’s headliner walked out to join him, it was as a duo — two instruments, no band — for “Groundhog,” a traditional tune older than either of them. The arena had been built in 1996 for the Nashville Predators of the NHL. It had been sold out for a thirty-one-year-old guitarist and singer from Lansing, Michigan.

The musician’s name was Billy Strings. The arena had not been the first arena he had filled that month. There had been Ball Arena in Denver, the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Madison Square Garden in New York. He had been playing rooms at this scale, regularly, for nearly two years. He had won the IBMA’s Entertainer of the Year award three times in a row by then, and would win it a fourth time the following autumn. He had won three Grammys for Best Bluegrass Album.

This is the last chapter of this section, and it covers the most recent thirteen years of bluegrass — roughly 2013 through 2026. It will not be a story about Billy Strings. He is the most visible single figure in the chapter, but he is not the cause of the structural changes the music has been working through. He is, instead, a synecdoche — a singular indication of a wider set of shifts that have been happening in parallel, on independent timelines, in different musical scenes, with different audiences. The most important of those shifts is that for the first time in the music’s history, women hold the top tier of every IBMA instrumental and vocal award category. A second is that the genre’s founding generation, which had been working continuously since 1939, is now essentially gone. A third is that the catalog has become legible to a new audience through algorithmic discovery on phones — a delivery mechanism that no one in the music’s first sixty years could have anticipated. These changes are not Strings’s doing. They have been the conditions inside which his career, and many others, have unfolded.

The chapter that follows tries to hold all of these moving pieces at once, without overweighting the most visible one.

The Earls of Leicester and the archival turn

Jerry Douglas, by 2013, had been the dobro player on the white album and the Earls of Leicester were not yet a band. Douglas had spent the previous thirty-eight years as a sideman, a session musician, a Krauss-band member, a Grammy-winning solo artist, and the defining voice of the resonator guitar in American music. He was, by the early 2010s, fifty-seven years old. He had been listening to the Foggy Mountain Boys records since he was a child.

In 2013, with the founders’ deaths still fresh, Douglas convened a band. The premise was straightforward: to record a Flatt and Scruggs tribute album with musicians who could play the catalog at the same level the original band had. Douglas himself would direct from the dobro chair. Shawn Camp, a Nashville singer-songwriter with a clean Tennessee tenor, was hired for the Flatt role on guitar and lead vocals. Charlie Cushman, who had been Earl Scruggs’s protégé in the 1980s, took the Scruggs role on banjo — playing the original arrangements note-for-note. Tim O’Brien joined initially on mandolin; he would later be replaced by Jeff White. Barry Bales, Krauss’s longtime bassist, was the band’s anchor on bass.

The decision that most marked the project, beyond the personnel, was Douglas’s hiring of Johnny Warren on fiddle. Warren was the son of Paul Warren, who had played fiddle beside Lester Flatt for nearly a quarter century — with the Foggy Mountain Boys from 1954, then in Flatt’s Nashville Grass until shortly before his own death in 1978. Johnny Warren had grown up in the band’s orbit — had sat in his father’s lap during recording sessions in the 1960s, had watched Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt arrange songs in the family kitchen. He played his father’s parts in the new band. The recording was the closing of a circuit nobody had planned.

The Earls of Leicester came out on Rounder Records in 2014. It won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in February 2015. At the IBMA Awards the following September, the band swept four categories — Album of the Year, Instrumental Group of the Year, Vocal Group of the Year, and Entertainer of the Year — plus Douglas’s annual Dobro Player of the Year, his twenty-third such award. The band won IBMA Entertainer of the Year again in 2016 and again in 2017 — three consecutive years, a streak only the Del McCoury Band had previously matched in the IBMA era. The second album, Rattle & Roar (2016), won the Bluegrass Grammy again in February 2017.

What the project did, in a way nothing previous had managed, was give the Flatt and Scruggs catalog a contemporary, Grammy-decorated working presence. By 2013 the songs had become folk standards — they had been played at every bluegrass festival in the country for sixty years — but they had not, since the band’s 1969 breakup, been performed straight, with the original arrangements, by a touring band of this caliber. The Earls of Leicester were not a tribute act in the museum sense. They were a working band whose project happened to be the careful preservation of a specific recorded catalog. Douglas has said in interviews that the project felt, to him, like passing on a body of work he had been carrying. Johnny Warren, playing the parts his father had played, was the project’s quiet emotional center.

Raleigh, then Chattanooga

In September 2013, the IBMA held its first World of Bluegrass conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, after eight years in Louisville and two years in Nashville. The decision had been made in early 2013 — partly for financial reasons (the city of Raleigh had offered substantial hosting incentives), partly for institutional reasons (the IBMA had been looking for a city that could host both the trade conference and a major public festival under one umbrella). The Raleigh model that emerged combined a four-day industry trade show at the Raleigh Convention Center, the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards Show at the Duke Energy Center, and a free street festival called Wide Open Bluegrass that took over downtown Raleigh for the weekend.

The Wide Open Bluegrass festival, in its first year, drew approximately 160,000 attendees. By the late 2010s the number had grown beyond 200,000 — making it the largest free urban roots-music festival in the country, by a substantial margin. The Raleigh decade — 2013 through 2023 — was the IBMA’s longest residency in any city since its founding in 1985. It moved the music’s institutional public face decisively eastward, into the same Carolina foothills that had produced Doc Watson.

In 2024, after ten years, the IBMA moved its annual event to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The first Chattanooga edition ran September 16 through 20, 2025. The contract is in place through 2027. Raleigh kept a successor public festival, called Raleigh Wide Open, that runs annually on its own. The Chattanooga move was not a crisis; it was the kind of routine venue contract change that any large annual conference goes through. The institutional center of the music remains where it has been.

The IBMA Entertainer of the Year award, across this decade, serves as a rough structural index of the music’s working priorities. Del McCoury and the Del McCoury Band won the award in 2012 and 2013 — the last of the McCoury era. Balsam Range took it in 2014 and again in 2018. The Earls of Leicester held it 2015 through 2017. Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers won it in 2019. In 2020, in a virtual ceremony held over Zoom with no audience in the room, Sister Sadie became the first all-woman band ever to win Entertainer of the Year. Billy Strings won the award in 2021, 2022, 2023, and again in 2025 — four times in five years. The list, read in order, describes a shift: from the McCoury family-band continuity, to a generation of male-led traditional ensembles, to the women’s breakthrough, to a young artist whose audience scale was an order of magnitude larger than anything the IBMA’s mainstream had ever produced.

Billy Strings, in proportion

William Lee Apostol was born in Lansing, Michigan, on October 3, 1992. His biological father died of a heroin overdose when he was two. His mother remarried Terry Barber, an amateur bluegrass musician of considerable skill who had a substantial record collection and a working knowledge of the Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, and Norman Blake catalogs. Terry Barber taught his stepson to play the guitar before he was five years old. By six the boy was sitting in at his stepfather’s living-room jams, picking up tunes by ear. The family moved between Michigan and Morehead, Kentucky, then back to Muir, Michigan. His stage name, Billy Strings, came from an aunt who had watched him pick up every instrument that came in the room.

The biographical facts of his adolescence are harder. Lansing, Ionia, Muir — the Mid-Michigan towns where he grew up — were, in the late 1990s and 2000s, ravaged by methamphetamine. Strings has spoken in interviews about losing family members to addiction, about the slow rebuilding of relationships that took most of his late teens, and about his own period of substance trouble in the rock-band years that followed his bluegrass apprenticeship. He came back to acoustic music in his early twenties. By 2014, when he and the mandolinist Don Julin released their first duo record Fiddle Tune X, Strings was twenty-one and had been playing in regional Michigan bluegrass scenes for several years.

Fiddle Tune X and a 2016 follow-up established the band’s regional reputation. By 2017 Strings had signed with Rounder Records and assembled his own touring band: Billy Failing on banjo, Royal Masat on bass, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and a rotating fiddle chair eventually held by Alex Hargreaves. Turmoil & Tinfoil, released that year, was the first record by Billy Strings as a bandleader.

Home, released September 27, 2019, won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in March 2021 — released months before the pandemic and won during it. The IBMA named Strings Entertainer of the Year in 2021, again in 2022, again in 2023. Renewal followed in 2021. Me/And/Dad, a duet record with Terry Barber recorded across the better part of a year, came out in November 2022 — the project Strings had wanted to make since he was a child. Highway Prayers was released September 27, 2024 — and won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in February 2026, Strings’s third in the category.

What Strings does in a live show is, by the standards of the genre’s institutional history, hard to categorize. He pivots, within a single set and sometimes within a single song, between Bill Monroe instrumentals played straight at festival tempo and twenty-minute improvisations that sound — and are intended to sound — like the Grateful Dead at the Capitol Theatre in 1976. The same audience receives both. In a long extended improvisation he is, demonstrably, playing inside the jam-band-scene vocabulary that String Cheese Incident and Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain had spent the previous two decades building. Five minutes later, on the next song, he is playing inside the hard-traditional vocabulary that the Earls of Leicester were also working in. The synthesis — and it is genuinely a synthesis, not a juxtaposition — is what Old & In the Way had gestured at in 1973 but had been unable to sustain across a career.

The arena-scale touring claim deserves careful framing. Bluegrass has had artists at large-room scale before. Alison Krauss and Union Station played amphitheaters through the Raising Sand tour in 2008. The Del McCoury Band and Sam Bush sit in at festivals with Phish that have drawn six-figure crowds. Down From the Mountain in 2001 and 2002 played arena-class rooms. What Strings has done that no previous bluegrass act has sustained is a regular arena-scale headlining tour — multiple-night stands at venues like Bridgestone, Ball Arena, Madison Square Garden, the Forum, the Greek Theatre — anchored entirely by his own band’s draw, year after year, without a featured pop-music partner or a film soundtrack underneath him. That scale of regular touring is genuinely new to the genre.

In his 2025 IBMA keynote address — given the same year he won Entertainer of the Year for the fourth time — Strings was insistent on the framing the genre’s older institutional memory had been resisting. Bluegrass, he said, had been healthy before he arrived, and would be after. He did not see himself as having saved or transformed the music. He saw himself as a hard-traditional player who had drawn, by some combination of historical timing and the audience’s appetite, a much larger room than most of his peers had been able to fill. The right way to read his career, on his own account, was as one visible signal of a structural change happening across the whole music — and not as the cause.

The women who became the new center

The structural change the chapter has to land most carefully is this. Between 2017 and 2024, women won the IBMA’s awards in every major instrumental and vocal category for the first time in the institution’s history. Molly Tuttle became the first woman ever to win IBMA Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, repeated in 2018, then again in 2024. Sierra Hull, who had been winning IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year since 2016, by 2024 had taken the award seven times — more than any other mandolinist in any decade. Becky Buller had become the first woman to win IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year in 2016; Deanie Richardson became the second, in 2020. Sister Sadie won Entertainer of the Year that same year, the first all-woman band ever to take the award. The instrument categories had been given annually since 1990. They had run twenty-six years before a woman won one.

The lineage that produced these breakthroughs runs back through the chapters of this section. Hazel Dickens had cleared ground in the 1960s and 1970s. Alison Krauss had, in the 1990s and 2000s, demonstrated the music’s commercial ceiling and, with Union Station, won IBMA Entertainer of the Year as early as 1991. Rhonda Vincent had taken the IBMA’s Female Vocalist of the Year seven years running through the early 2000s. Lynn Morris had led the most prominent woman-fronted touring band of the 1990s. The third wave of the lineage — the musicians who came up through the 2010s — was something else again: technically the equal of any of their male peers, audience-recognized as such, and arriving at the institutional top of the music at roughly the same time.

Molly Tuttle was born in 1993 in Palo Alto, California. Her father Jack Tuttle had taught at the Gryphon Stringed Instruments school in Palo Alto for thirty years; he was Molly’s first guitar teacher. She has alopecia universalis — she has discussed it openly throughout her career, both her wig-wearing for performances and the diagnosis itself. Her first solo album, When You’re Ready, came out in 2019. The follow-up, Crooked Tree, recorded with her touring band Golden Highway (Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Kyle Tuttle on banjo, Shelby Means on bass), came out on Nonesuch in April 2022. It won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 65th awards in February 2023. City of Gold, released in July 2023, won the same award the following year — making Tuttle the first artist in the category’s history to win consecutively. She reclaimed the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year award in 2024, after a five-year break from the trophy.

Sierra Hull, born in 1991 in Byrdstown, Tennessee, signed with Rounder Records at thirteen. Her first album, Secrets, came out in 2008 when she was sixteen. The work that established her as the era’s most ambitious mandolinist began with Weighted Mind, released in 2016 — an album produced by Béla Fleck that drew on chamber music, classical-mandolin technique, and bluegrass harmonic vocabulary in roughly equal measure. 25 Trips (2020) and A Tip Toe High Wire (2025) extended the project. Hull’s seven IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year wins, by 2025, made her the most decorated woman in any IBMA instrumental category. Her work sits in a clear lineage with Chris Thile’s — both are mandolin virtuosos who have used the instrument to compose music that the bluegrass tradition had not previously imagined — but with a quieter public profile and a more vocal-led, more interior emphasis.

Sarah Jarosz, born in Texas in 1991, signed with Sugar Hill Records at sixteen and recorded her first album in 2009. Her four Grammy wins — for Build Me Up From Bones (2013), Undercurrent (2016), World on the Ground (2020, which won Best Americana Album), and Polaroid Lovers (2024) — span Best Folk Album, Best American Roots Performance, and Best Americana Album categories. She has carried, since her late twenties, a substantially larger commercial profile than her bluegrass-festival origins would have predicted.

Aoife O’Donovan, the former lead vocalist of Crooked Still, built her own solo career across the same decade. Fossils (2013), In the Magic Hour (2016), Age of Apathy (January 2022 — produced by Joe Henry and nominated for three Grammys), and All My Friends (2024 — commissioned for the centennial of the 19th Amendment) constituted one of the period’s most carefully composed solo discographies. Her appearance on both Goat Rodeo Sessions records, alongside Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, anchored the classical-bluegrass crossover lineage at its highest commercial register.

In 2014, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Sara Watkins, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sarah Jarosz played together for the first time as an informal trio at a late-night festival jam. They liked the sound enough to begin scheduling tour dates. By 2017 they had a band name — I’m With Her — and a recording contract with Rounder. Their first album, See You Around, came out in February 2018, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England. Their second, Wild and Clear and Blue, came out in May 2025. The latter won the Grammy for Best Folk Album at the 68th awards in February 2026; the album’s track “Ancient Light” won Best American Roots Song.

Sister Sadie’s 2020 IBMA Entertainer of the Year win was, in the structural sense, the breakthrough most heavily weighted. The band had formed in 2012 around the singer-mandolinist Tina Adair, the singer Dale Ann Bradley, the fiddler Deanie Richardson, and the banjoist Gena Britt. The lineup changed several times over the next eight years. The 2020 win came in a ceremony held entirely over Zoom — no audience, no in-room reaction. The award was announced into an empty hall. Within twelve months Adair, Bradley, and Britt had all left the band; Sister Sadie reformed with a new lineup that included the singer-guitarist Jaelee Roberts and the bassist Maddie Dalton. The band continued. The 2020 award stood — the first all-woman band ever to win Entertainer of the Year, in a ceremony that no one outside the IBMA staff and a handful of family members had attended.

Della Mae, the Boston-based women’s bluegrass band that had been founded in 2009 by the fiddler Kimber Ludiker, kept working through the decade with rotating personnel. Their 2013 record This World Oft Can Be on Rounder had been the band’s commercial breakthrough; the IBMA Emerging Artist nomination that same year was the first they earned in a long string of nominations across the next decade. Della Mae’s State Department touring through Central Asia and the Middle East, organized through the American Music Abroad program, would constitute one of the more unexpected diplomatic uses of the bluegrass instrumental vocabulary in the music’s history.

The fact this section needs to land clearly is that the women’s wave in this decade was not a “diversity moment” or an IBMA correction. Molly Tuttle was the best flatpicker of her generation when the 2017 award vote came around. Sierra Hull was the most rigorous mandolinist under forty in 2016. The award categories, which had been running annually since 1990, tracked an audience consensus that had developed gradually across the previous decade and a half. What changed in the late 2010s was not the quality of the playing — that had been there — but the institutional willingness to acknowledge it.

The Punch Brothers’ classical pivot, Nickel Creek reunions, and the Goat Rodeo arc

Punch Brothers, after the relative bluegrass-progressive consolidation of Antifogmatic (2010) and Who’s Feeling Young Now? (2012), made a substantial pivot. The Phosphorescent Blues, released in January 2015 and produced by T-Bone Burnett, brought Scriabin and Debussy into the same record as bluegrass-prog originals. The arrangements treated the band — Chris Thile, Chris Eldridge, Noam Pikelny, Gabe Witcher, and Paul Kowert — as a classical chamber ensemble that happened to use bluegrass instrumentation. All Ashore followed in 2018; it won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in February 2019 — the band’s most overtly composed record.

Hell on Church Street, released January 14, 2022, was a particular kind of project. The band had decided to record a cover of Tony Rice’s 1983 solo album Church Street Blues — track for track, in the same key, with substantially the same instrumental arrangements. The recording took place at Blackbird Studios in Nashville in November 2020. The band had intended to send the finished record to Rice as a gift. Tony Rice died at his home in Reidsville, North Carolina, on Christmas Day 2020, before the album was mixed. The record was released with new framing — as an elegy rather than a tribute.

Chris Thile’s working life across the same decade included the MacArthur Fellowship (October 2012), his hosting of A Prairie Home Companion (renamed Live from Here) from October 2016 through June 2020 — when the pandemic ended the show’s funding — and a series of cross-genre collaborations that took him further from bluegrass than any previous figure in the music had gone. He recorded with Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma on the second Goat Rodeo Sessions album, Not Our First Goat Rodeo (June 2020) — the follow-up to the 2011 original — alongside Stuart Duncan and Aoife O’Donovan. He recorded a Bach sonata album. He recorded an album of original liturgical music. By 2025 he was, by most measures, one of the most decorated instrumentalists alive in any genre.

Nickel Creek, dormant since 2007 except for a brief 2014 reunion record, returned in March 2023 with Celebrants — a more ambitious second reunion record conceived as a single arc rather than a collection of songs. The band toured the album through 2023 and 2024. The three principals — Chris Thile, Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins — were now in their early to mid forties, married, with children, with parallel solo careers that had run for the better part of a decade. The reunion was not a comeback. It was a working band returning to its first room, having spent fifteen years apart in other rooms, having earned the right to walk back into the original.

Andrew Marlin, John Reischman, and the new-acoustic continuation

While Punch Brothers and the women’s wave got most of the press, the lineage that David Grisman had named in 1975 — the new-acoustic instrumental tradition — continued through the decade in a quieter register. The Grisman Quintet’s original instrumental experiment had branched into multiple bands and collaborations. By the late 2010s the lineage’s most consistent contemporary practitioner was the Canadian-American mandolinist John Reischman, who had been leading the Jaybirds — his Vancouver-based chamber-bluegrass band — since 2000. Reischman’s solo records Up in the Woods (2008) and Walk Along John (2018) had become studied texts among mandolinists.

The lineage’s most prominent new contributor in this decade was Andrew Marlin, a North Carolina mandolinist who, with his musical partner Emily Frantz, had been performing as Mandolin Orange since 2009. In 2021 the duo renamed themselves Watchhouse — after a small family cabin on the Chesapeake Bay that had been important to Frantz’s family. The renaming was partly aesthetic and partly political; the word “Mandolin” had increasingly read, in the Americana-dominated marketing climate of the 2010s, as a genre signifier they didn’t want to carry. Watchhouse’s self-titled record came out the same year. Marlin’s solo instrumental records — Buried in a Cape (2017) and the twin February 2021 releases Witching Hour and Fable & Fire — sat consciously inside the Grisman dawg-music lineage, with melodically Appalachian phrasings and less of the gypsy-jazz swing of the original Grisman Quintet.

Mike Marshall, the original David Grisman Quintet alumnus, continued working through the decade in his Choro Famoso (Brazilian-music) and Modern Mandolin Quartet ensembles, with a Big Trio collaboration with Edgar Meyer and Béla Fleck that revisited the post-bluegrass instrumental territory the three had first explored in the Telluride Sessions. Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings and his Psychograss reunions filled out the same generation’s continuing output. Edgar Meyer’s classical-bluegrass crossover work — including the Goat Rodeo records — extended his position as the lineage’s most accomplished crossover composer.

These are catalog continuations rather than breakthroughs. The new-acoustic tradition is, by 2026, a stable and recognized branch of the music — neither expanding rapidly nor in any sense diminishing.

The mainstream center

While Strings was filling arenas and Punch Brothers were writing chamber music and Tuttle and Hull were winning Grammys, the IBMA mainstream continued through the decade producing working bands at the same steady rate it had been producing them since the founding of the IBMA in 1985. The bands that played the IBMA Awards every year, that won most of the awards, and that anchored the festival circuit’s working economy were largely the bands the previous chapter had named — extended into new territory by new personnel and continuing institutional success.

The Del McCoury Band, with Del himself in his middle eighties, continued to tour. The band won IBMA Entertainer of the Year in 2012 and 2013 — the last consecutive run of the McCoury era. Del’s sons Ronnie and Rob continued in the family band and, in parallel, led the Travelin’ McCourys — an offshoot project formed in the late 2000s with the guitarist Cody Kilby, the fiddler Jason Carter, and the bassist Alan Bartram. The Travelin’ McCourys won IBMA Instrumental Group of the Year in 2018 and the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2019 for their self-titled record. The McCoury name now anchored two distinct working bands.

Balsam Range, the North Carolina ensemble built around the high-tenor vocalist Buddy Melton and the multi-instrumentalists Tim Surrett and Caleb Smith, won IBMA Entertainer of the Year in 2014 and again in 2018. Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers, the Ohio-based band led by the broadcaster Joe Mullins, won the same award in 2019. Junior Sisk, the West Virginia-based hard-traditional singer, won IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year in 2013. The Lonesome River Band continued under the long-tenured banjoist Sammy Shelor, recording new records every two or three years for Mountain Home.

Doyle Lawson, who had been leading Quicksilver since 1979, retired from active touring at the end of 2021. His final show was at the Jekyll Island Bluegrass Festival on December 30, 2021 — the close of a fifty-nine-year career that had run continuously from his teenage years with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys in the early 1960s through the Country Gentlemen of the 1970s and Quicksilver from 1979 onward. The retirement was a year ahead of his original schedule, accelerated by the pandemic.

The SteelDrivers continued without Chris Stapleton, who had left in 2010 for his eventual country-music career. They won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album with The Muscle Shoals Recordings in 2015 — the band’s first Grammy since their formation a decade earlier. They continued recording through Bad For You (2020) and the gospel album Tougher Than Nails (2023).

Rhonda Vincent, the seven-time IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year and the central figure of the early-2000s traditional-revival scene, continued to win Female Vocalist of the Year through the 2010s. After a long Covid-delayed induction process, she became a member of the Grand Ole Opry on February 6, 2021.

Alison Krauss recorded with Union Station for the last time on the studio album Paper Airplane in 2011, then released her solo album Windy City in 2017. Raise the Roof, her second collaboration with Robert Plant, came out on November 19, 2021 — fourteen years after Raising Sand. Krauss remained, in 2026, among the most decorated artists in Grammy history — twenty-seven awards, a total that stood as the record for a female artist for years until Beyoncé passed it.

Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder continued through the decade. Skaggs was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on October 21, 2018. At his Medallion Ceremony he played, briefly, the 1923 Lloyd Loar Gibson F-5 mandolin that had belonged to Bill Monroe — an instrument now part of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s permanent collection. He had played the same mandolin once before, as a six-year-old, in 1961, in front of Monroe himself. The image of the inductee taking that specific instrument out of its case, on the night of his own induction, to play “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” was the kind of generational handoff the music’s institutional history rarely produced cleanly. It produced one that night.

Sam Bush continued with the Sam Bush Band, recording Storyman (2016) and Radio John (2022) — the latter a tribute to John Hartford on which Bush played nearly every instrument on every track.

The pandemic, livestream, streaming, and TikTok

In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic ended live music performance in North America for the better part of eighteen months. Festivals cancelled their summer 2020 lineups. The IBMA’s October 2020 World of Bluegrass conference moved entirely online; the ceremony at which Sister Sadie won Entertainer of the Year was held over Zoom with no audience in the room. Live from Here, Chris Thile’s variety show, was cancelled by the underwriting public-radio network in June 2020. The festival circuit’s slow rebuild took most of 2021 and 2022.

What filled the gap, for the working musicians who depended on touring income, was livestreaming. Billy Strings did weekly living-room livestreams in 2020 and built, over the course of those streams, the audience that would fill arenas the following year. Punch Brothers organized a livestream concert series called Hello Fellow Travelers. Watchhouse continued to release studio recordings. The Earls of Leicester recorded a livestream tribute concert for the IBMA’s 2020 virtual ceremony. Sister Sadie accepted their Entertainer of the Year award from individual home studios. The shift was unanticipated, and across the industry it lasted longer than anyone in March 2020 would have predicted — well into 2022 for many bands.

The economic shift the pandemic accelerated was older than the pandemic. Streaming royalties had been gradually replacing album sales for a decade. By 2020 the major bluegrass labels — Rounder, Compass, Mountain Home, Smithsonian Folkways — had each developed their own digital-distribution strategies. The principal revenue source for working bluegrass musicians had moved decisively toward live performance. Records had become, for the touring economy, calling cards rather than the product. Strings’s arena economics are streaming-era economics — the records exist to drive ticket sales for the tours.

The other accelerant of the era was TikTok. Beginning in late 2019 and accelerating through the pandemic, short-form video discovery on phone-based social platforms became a substantial distribution channel for acoustic-music performances. Billy Strings clips circulated; Molly Tuttle reels of fast guitar runs reached audiences who had not previously encountered bluegrass; the West Virginia singer Sierra Ferrell built much of her early audience through TikTok. The format favored the visible, the singular, and the genre-blurring. A new layer of audience came into the music through algorithmic discovery rather than through the IBMA pipeline or the festival-circuit infrastructure.

Sierra Ferrell, born in Charleston, West Virginia and based in Nashville, is worth a careful sentence in this context. Her records — Long Time Coming (Rounder, 2021), Trail of Flowers (Rounder, March 2024) — sit closer to old-time and honky-tonk than to bluegrass strictly. She is, in the conventional genre sense, adjacent to bluegrass rather than central to it. Her commercial breakthrough in 2024 — including four Grammy wins at the February 2025 ceremony, with Trail of Flowers winning Best Americana Album — was one of the era’s most significant adjacent-genre developments. The bluegrass instrumental vocabulary continues to be one of the building blocks of the broader roots-music universe.

Deaths, and what the catalog now is

The founding generation, by 2026, is essentially gone. Mac Wiseman — one of the last men alive who had played in both Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, the Voice with a Heart, a Country Music Association co-founder who had been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014 — died at his home in Nashville on February 24, 2019. He was ninety-three. With his death the last working principal of the music’s 1940s commercial founding moment was gone.

Tony Rice — who had been the lead voice on the white album in 1975 and the principal guitar on every record the Bluegrass Album Band made — died at his home in Reidsville, North Carolina on Christmas Day 2020. He was sixty-nine. He had not sung publicly since 1994, when muscle tension dysphonia ended his singing career. He had not played guitar publicly since 2013, when tennis elbow took his right hand from him. He had been writing and listening, by all accounts, throughout the seven years of his retirement. The Punch Brothers’ Hell on Church Street — recorded as a gift for him in November 2020 — had been a month from being sent when he died.

Bobby Osborne, the last working principal of the Osborne Brothers, died on June 27, 2023, at ninety-one. He had been singing “Rocky Top” — the song the Bryants had written in ten minutes at the Gatlinburg Inn in August 1967 — for nearly fifty-six years. He had been on the Grand Ole Opry stage as recently as 2022.

Other notable losses across the decade: Hazel Dickens died on April 22, 2011 — before this chapter’s window technically begins, but worth marking as the gateway to the women’s wave that the chapter has spent most of its space on. John Hartford had died ten years earlier in 2001. Charlie Daniels died on July 6, 2020 — adjacent to bluegrass through his fiddle work and his country-rock career, but not central to it. Gary Scruggs, Earl Scruggs’s eldest son and a longtime sideman in his father’s bands, died in December 2021.

What the music has, by 2026, is its catalog. The founders have made the records they were going to make and have left them. The second-generation musicians who learned from the founders — Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Alison Krauss — are still mostly working, some in their seventies, none of them quite young anymore. The third-generation musicians the previous chapter introduced — Krauss’s apprentices, the Punch Brothers, the Nickel Creek principals, the Crooked Still alumni — are now in their forties and at the height of their working lives. The fourth-generation musicians who came up in the 2010s — Tuttle, Hull, Jarosz, the Sister Sadie principals, Billy Strings — are now between thirty and forty-five. The fifth generation, the players who came up in their adolescence after the pandemic, is just starting to emerge.

The catalog has, for the first time in the genre’s history, passed decisively into the hands of musicians who learned it from records.

The chapter closes

The image to close with is, in some sense, a multiple-exposure photograph. The same week in March 2024, somewhere in the second weekend of that year’s Strings arena run, the following things were happening at once. Billy Strings was selling out his second consecutive night at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Sister Sadie was playing a four-hundred-seat theater in western North Carolina to an audience that was mostly local IBMA members. Watchhouse was playing a listening room in Asheville to about two hundred people. The Travelin’ McCourys were at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia — the room the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene had played for thirty years before them. The Earls of Leicester were rehearsing for a Flatt and Scruggs tribute concert at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. And at the Camp Bluegrass instructional camp in Levelland, Texas, some thirteen-year-old was getting her first mandolin lesson in a parking lot — the part of the story that never makes the histories until twenty years later.

Bluegrass, in 2026, exists at all of those scales at once. The arena and the listening room and the four-hundred-seat theater and the festival side-stage and the camp parking lot are all sustaining versions of the same music. None of these scales existed in any meaningful form when Bill Monroe walked Earl Scruggs onstage in early December 1945. None of them existed when Carter Stanley sang “Six More Miles” on the radio in Bristol the following December. The arc the seven chapters of this section have traced has been the gradual emergence of a music whose institutional, economic, and audience structures became durable enough to hold all of these working scales simultaneously.

The history began, in Chapter 1, with a banjo and a fiddle meeting in the eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia hill country — the Anglo-Celtic ballad tradition and the African banjo coming together in working hands across generations. By the 1940s those streams had been worked, by Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, into a definite band-form. By the late 1960s the music had escaped the band-form into a festival circuit. By the late 1980s it had built an institutional infrastructure. By the early 2000s it had reached, briefly, a mass-cultural audience. And by 2026, with the founders gone and the audience grown, the catalog and the working scenes that interpret it have become a continuous tradition in a way few American popular musics have managed.

Bluegrass is one of the few genuinely American musical forms with a known origin date — December 1945, in a Nashville hotel room — and a still-traceable lineage. The kid in Lansing, Michigan whose stepfather taught him Doc Watson tunes is two musical generations from the inventors. The Punch Brothers covering Tony Rice covering an early-twentieth-century folk song is three generations of catalog-on-catalog interpretation. The Earls of Leicester, with Johnny Warren playing his father Paul Warren’s fiddle parts, is the kind of direct continuity that no popular music with a substantial commercial life is supposed to be able to sustain. Bluegrass has sustained it for eighty years. By 2026 it has sustained it long enough that the question of whether it will continue to sustain it has, in any practical sense, stopped being asked.

The chapter ends here, with the catalog passing through hands that learned it from records and through hands that learned it from the records of those records. The work of figuring out what comes next will belong, as it always has, to whoever picks up the instruments.

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Sources and further reading

• Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (University of Illinois Press, 1985; rev. 2005). The standing scholarly history.
• Murphy Hicks Henry, Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass (University of Illinois Press, 2013). Indispensable for the women’s-wave lineage.
• The International Bluegrass Music Association and its Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum — institutional and awards history.
• Amanda Petrusich, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (Faber & Faber, 2008). The standing critical text on the bluegrass-Americana relationship.
• Recording Academy Grammy Awards database — for award histories.
• The Library of Congress National Recording Registry — for canonical-recording designations.