Bluegrass didn’t stop with Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. The second generation — folks like the Country Gentlemen, the Dillards, the Seldom Scene, Hazel Dickens, Ola Belle Reed — took the music their elders built and pushed it somewhere new. They pulled in songs by John Prine and Mickey Newbury. They wrote their own standards. They worked older traditional pieces like “Nine Pound Hammer” and “Working on a Building” into the bluegrass repertoire for good. These 14 songs are the ones you’ll hear called at jams across the country, and knowing them is part of speaking the language.

Use this as a working list. Learn a few at a time, get them under your fingers, and bring them to your next jam. Each song’s page here has chord charts, lyrics, recordings to listen to, and the song’s history — where it came from and who carried it forward.