Newgrass is what happened when bluegrass musicians started pulling in folk, country-rock, and singer-songwriter material in the 1970s and kept going from there. Old and in the Way put David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and Jerry Garcia in a room together and gave a generation of pickers permission to stretch the form. John Hartford was doing his own thing on the riverboat side of it. Two decades later, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings showed that the writing tradition was still wide open, and Tim O’Brien kept the songwriter’s craft front and center. These sixteen songs are the ones you hear at jams, on stages, and on records that anyone playing acoustic music today grew up listening to.

Treat this as a learning list. Work through a few at a time. Each song’s page on Picker’s Guide has chord charts, lyrics, recordings to listen to, and the song’s history.