PODCAST · arts
The String
by WMOT/Roots Radio 89.5 FM
The String is weekly think radio featuring conversations and features on culture, media and American music - anchored by veteran journalist and broadcaster Craig Havighurst. Music makers, enablers, instigators and documentarians are featured with enough time to go deep and burrow into issues, while letting the music play too. Music news, previews, Time Machine Tape and 90 Second Spins round out the hour.
Episodes
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Bryan Sutton
Episode 372: In the late 1990s, Bryan Sutton was a young phenom who dropped jaws across the country as the lead guitarist in Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder. And he was more than a flash in the pan, becoming the most in-demand studio session acoustic guitar player in Nashville and a ten-time…
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Buddy Miller
Episode 371: Buddy Miller is the most awarded musician in the history of the Americana Music Association, with two Artist of the Year trophies, three Albums of the Year, and the lifetime achievement Wagonmaster Award. That's a lot of attention on one humble man. But he's worn his ambassador…
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Margo Price
Episode 370: A decade after her national breakout as a top alt-country visionary, more than two decades after her move to Nashville and her long, grueling apprenticeship in Music City, Margo Price is one of Americana music's leading stars and cultural voices. She's sung protest songs at Newport...
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Sean Sullivan
Episode 369: In his almost 20 years of recording Americana music in Nashville, 39-year-old Sean Sullivan has earned a reputation for impeccable recording and mixing of quality instruments, be they antique acoustic or classic electric. Working since the pandemic out of the Tractor Shed in...
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Charlie Worsham
Episode 368: He's one of Music City's most respected "multi-hyphenate" music-makers - an artist-singer-songwriter-picker-producer who's had his hand in scores of hit records while releasing much-admired albums of his own over a 20 year career in town. Craig regards him as a "Music Row whisperer,"…
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Sweet Megg
Episode 367: One of the stars of Nashville's recent honky tonk boom first found her muse playing in late night jazz clubs of New York and Paris. That set Sweet Megg apart when she moved here just after the pandemic - a flair for early blues and hot club swing. In Music City, she's also developed…
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Allison Russell
Episode 366: In The Hour Of Chaos, Allison Russell's third solo album, brings the power of harmony and solidarity into a time of division and fear. In an interview days before its release, the songwriter says her "rainbow coalition" of collaborators has grown since her breakout album Outside…
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Aaron Lee Tasjan
Episode 365: His biography sounds like several different people: accomplished jazz guitar player, New York City glam rocker, progressive Americana songwriter in Nashville. That's why Aaron Lee Tasjan comes across as a true American original. Over 13 years in Music City, Tasjan's been prolific and...
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ISMAY
Episode 364: As Avery Hellman came of age in California, she took advantage of her good fortune of being from the family that established the game-changing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco. It exposed her to standard-setting songwriting and artistry in folk and roots music, and...
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Devon Gilfillian
Episode 363: Devon Gilfillian has been a key artist fulfilling the promise of a New Music City - a Nashville that's been welcome to the widest-ever range of genres, influences and innovations. He came to town with no contacts and a job with AmeriCorps in 2013. But before very long he'd landed a...
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Tenille Townes
Episode 362: Songwriter and artist Tenille Townes is a certified star in Canada where she's won heaps of awards and seen her moving songs top the country charts. In over a dozen years in Nashville, she's been an impressive songwriter with one foot in major label country and another in Americana....
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John R. Miller
Episode 361: Folk rocker John R. Miller can be dry and understated, but get beneath the surface and you'll find an artist keen to write music that helps people be better people. Inspired by John Prine and others, the Nashville based West Virginian has earned widespread acclaim and released three...
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Andy Leftwich
Episode 360: Andy Leftwich was a Tennessee string picking prodigy who crushed it at fiddle competitions and was working by his late teens. Then, before he turned twenty, he was offered a job (on stage no less) by legend Ricky Skaggs. For 15 years with Kentucky Thunder, he built a reputation as…
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Kashus Culpepper
Episode 359: We love it when great things happen to good people, especially when the story is a total surprise, and that's what's been going on with Alabama-raised singer and songwriter Kashus Culpepper. He'd never been on a stage or played the guitar before 2020, but a confluence of free time…
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The Milk Carton Kids
Episode 358: Fifteen years into their close and literally harmonious relationship, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale sound as satisfied and enriched as ever by the audience and aura they've established in Americana music. The Milk Carton Kids name was a self-effacing joke about how quickly they...
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Boy Golden
Episode 357: Liam Duncan grew up in the small city of Brandon, Manitoba and moved to the provincial capitol and musical hotbed of Winnipeg as soon as he could, thinking he might be a session musician and sideman. But post pandemic, he's been Boy Golden, a quirky, neo-romantic persona making some…
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Brit Taylor and Adam Chaffins
Episode 356: Brit Taylor came to town from eastern Kentucky chasing the US Route 23 dream that brought us Loretta Lynn and Patty Loveless - and wound up working with Cowboy Jack Clement and Sturgill Simpson. Adam Chaffins grew up one or two counties over and ensconced himself, as a bass player…
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Kevin Martin and Honky Tonk Tuesdays
Episode 355: Nearly 12 years ago, an informal arrangement between the caretakers of a down-on-its-luck American Legion Post and a handful of young honky tonk musicians led to the creation of Honky Tonk Tuesday Nights, one of the most vibrant residency music series of the past two decades. It's…
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The Infamous Stringdusters At 20
Episode 354: The Infamous Stringdusters emerged out of Nashville's world-class but somewhat undiscovered bluegrass scene of the 2000s. Six guys with different professional pathways into the music and wide ranging tastes in other genres got to know each other at gigs, picking parties, and the IBMA...
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Trey Hensley
Episode 353: He was an East Tennessee country guitar prodigy who was invited on the Grand Ole Opry at age 11 by Marty Stuart, and Trey Hensley has made good on that promise by emerging as one of the finest singers and pickers in contemporary roots music. His national profile took shape after...
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Emily Scott Robinson
Episode 352: When Emily Scott Robinson released Appalachia, her fifth album in a 10-year career and her third for Nashville boutique Oh Boy Records, it spiked up into the Americana airplay top ten, something that had never happened to her before. But she had set the table through quality...
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Sammy Brue and Jonathan Bernstein Remember Justin Townes Earle
Episode 351: Justin Townes Earle, blazingly gifted and deeply troubled, died of an accidental drug overdose in 2020 at the age of 38, after a life beset by addiction. Six years later, two coincident projects expand on what we knew about the songwriter with a mix of compassion and regret. Sammy...
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David Wilcox
Episode 350: Since breaking out with his 1989 major-label album How Did You Find Me Here, North Carolina's David Wilcox has been a consistently excellent practitioner of the new folk, fingerstyle guitar arts. The songwriter, known for his empathic writing and audience-embracing shows, is now 67…
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Voices From Folk Alliance 2026
Episode 349: For its 38th annual conference, Folk Alliance International returned to New Orleans, home of their largest-ever event (2020's draw of 3,600 people) and the epicenter of one of the nation's great regional roots music legacies. Besides a slate of Louisiana talent in blues, Cajun and...
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Kristina Train
Episode 348: Kristina Train is a singer and songwriter who should be on more people's radar. Her remarkable resume was built in the jazz world (Blue Note Records and touring with Herbie Hancock), but the Savannah, GA native has always shown mastery for a seductive strain of country soul. That…
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Rachael & Vilray
Episode 347: Rachael Price became an American fixture as the dynamic and flawless lead singer of roots/pop phenomenon Lake Street Dive. Long before she and the Dive were headlining Madison Square Garden, she was a Hendersonville, TN native pursuing a career in classic jazz, after her girlhood…
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Molly Tuttle
Episode 346: To say that a lot has happened since Molly Tuttle last appeared on The String in 2019 would be an understatement. She's won two Grammy Awards and been nominated for two more. She won her first IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Award, to go along with her two groundbreaking Guitar…
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Jacob Jolliff
Episode 345: Last year, The String got a new opening theme tune. "Vera" comes from New York based mandolin virtuoso, composer and band leader Jacob Jolliff. The Oregon native came East when he got a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music and joined a cadre of future acoustic stars clustered…
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Ashley Monroe
Episode 344: Ashley Monroe moved to Nashville just after 10th grade from East Tennessee with a single-minded drive to sing and write country music. Her career would be the envy of many - Grammy nominations, several major label albums, and Pistol Annies, an influential supergroup - and yet many in...
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Rosie Flores
Episode 343: Her name is made of flowers. And she's been spreading bouquets of joy and open-hearted country and rockabilly for more than 50 years. She is Rosie Flores, sounding great and enjoying the stage as much as she ever has as she cruised past her 75th birthday during Americanafest 2025. A...
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Daniel Donato
Episode #342: Daniel Donato became one of Nashville's more revered electric guitar players during his three years playing four nights a week at Robert's Western World on Lower Broadway. When he lost that gig in 2015, he had to start from scratch as a working musician and songwriting artist. In…
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Luther Dickinson Returns
Episode 341: Since co-founding the history-making, history-preserving North Mississippi Allstars almost 30 years ago, Luther Dickinson has taken his guitar, his deep blues repertoire, and his Memphis soul around the world and into all kinds of collaborations. In his latest return to The String…
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Robert Randolph
Episode 340: Robert Randolph had no plans or dreams to take his fiery talents on the pedal steel guitar beyond the New Jersey church where he grew up and the network of pentecostal Black churches around the country that made the "sacred steel" a core part of their services. But his passionate…
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Marcus King
Episode 339: South Carolina guitar wizard and powerhouse singer Marcus King has come through the valley of shadows, breaking self-destructive habits and arriving at a place of contentment and love on his latest album Darling Blue. In a career-spanning conversation, King talks about his unique…
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Tift Merritt plus Tony Kamel
Episode 338: North Carolina songwriter Tift Merritt became an instant star of Americana music when she emerged in the early 2000s with Bramble Rose (2002) and Tambourine (2004), but only with time have we learned that her relationship with her prestige record label - Lost Highway Records - was...
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Ken Pomeroy
Episode 337: Ken Pomeroy, who turned 23 days after this interview, is a fresh voice not just from the Oklahoma lineage of great roots songwriting and musicianship, but also from a new generation of Native American voices in popular music. She talks about her Cherokee heritage and the stewardship...
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Danny Burns and Shelby Means
Episode 336: In a time when bluegrass is surging with young talent and mainstream dreams, Danny Burns and Shelby Means offer two profiles in making the string band business work in 2025. Burns is an Irish immigrant who brought his trad training and hearty work ethic from his native County…
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Leslie Jordan
Episode 335: Leslie Jordan, the Nolensville, TN-based songwriter not the late comic actor and singer, makes a major statement in her pivot from a robust career in Christian folk/pop to storytelling Americana with The Agonist. It's a song cycle that fleshes out the story of her late grandfather, a...
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Shawn Camp
Episode 334: Shawn Camp arrived in Nashville almost 40 years ago as a 20-year-old guitar picker and fiddle player hoping to find a niche. As he graduated from touring sideman to songwriter to respected recording artist, he found himself working with his heroes. He quietly became an avatar of...
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Rodney Crowell
Episode 333: Rodney Crowell let it slip in the middle of this interview that it was the eve of his 75th birthday. One of America's greatest (and most commercially successful) songwriters is now three quarters of a century old, a steady patriarch. He continues to do excellent work, evidenced by…
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Tamara Saviano On Americana Music
Episode 332: It's been 30 years since three music business renegades created a radio chart for an emerging alt-country, roots music wave they called Americana. Now that it's a mature format and movement, we're seeing books emerge on the history of this idea. Poets And Dreamers: My Life In…
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Hayes Carll
Episode 331: Hayes Carll is such an admired veteran of the Texas songwriting tradition that his visage is painted on a sign along with Townes Van Zandt at the Old Quarter Cafe in Galveston. Over ten albums, he's matched cleverness with insight and tenderness with roadhouse rock and roll. In this...
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Mason Via
Episode 330: After a three-year tutelage with Old Crow Medicine Show, multi-faceted Appalachian artist Mason Via has set out on his own road. He was raised in bluegrass festival campgrounds and at picking parties hosted by his dad, songwriter and musician David Via. Bluegrass royalty hung out at...
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Cody Jinks
Episode 329: Few fully independent artists in any genre have been able to grow to the scale and influence that Cody Jinks has pulled off in the outlaw country space. He sells out iconic venues like Red Rocks in Colorado with a sound that layers his boyhood influence from Lefty Frizzell with the...
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Southern Avenue
Episode 328: While it's one of the great music cities in the world, the story of Memphis, TN is generally told as one about Elvis, BB King, Isaac Hayes, and possibly Justin Timberlake - artists from the history books or well on in their careers. Roots music fans might know more contemporary…
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Mike Farris
Episode 327: To hear Mike Farris sing - an experience a bit like being pinned to the seat of an accelerating Porsche Taycan - is to believe that he was born to the stage, motivated from childhood, and destined for soul/gospel glory. Yet in Episode 327 of The String, we learn that A) Mike is lucky...
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Andrea Zonn
Episode 326: Andrea Zonn has been on my list of possible Music City star musicians to be a guest on the show for some time, but her new project the HercuLeons and their debut album of the same name sealed the deal. She's been a leading studio and road musician since the 1990s, when she sweet…
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John Cowan
Episode 325: In 1972, a 19-year-old bass player and natural born singer from Kentucky and Indiana auditioned for an emerging band called New Grass Revival. Over almost 20 years, John Cowan would be the voice of that ensemble, through mega tours supporting Leon Russell, improbable country radio...
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The SteelDrivers
Episode 324: It's hard to believe that Nashville's SteelDrivers have been making their unique brand of hard-core string band music for nearly twenty years. They were the vehicle through which many of us were introduced to the epic voice of Chris Stapleton, back when he and Mike Henderson co-wrote...
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Larry & Joe
Special Episode: The story of how global banjo explorer Joe Troop (formerly of Che Apalache) met Venezuelan harpist and all-around folk music master Larry Bellorín is testimony to the magic of global culture and a cautionary tale about the stark turn US policy has taken against working asylum...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The String is weekly think radio featuring conversations and features on culture, media and American music - anchored by veteran journalist and broadcaster Craig Havighurst. Music makers, enablers, instigators and documentarians are featured with enough time to go deep and burrow into issues, while letting the music play too. Music news, previews, Time Machine Tape and 90 Second Spins round out the hour.
HOSTED BY
WMOT/Roots Radio 89.5 FM
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The String have?
The String currently has 300 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The String about?
The String is weekly think radio featuring conversations and features on culture, media and American music - anchored by veteran journalist and broadcaster Craig Havighurst. Music makers, enablers, instigators and documentarians are featured with enough time to go deep and burrow into issues, while...
How often does The String release new episodes?
The String publishes regularly with 300 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The String?
You can listen to The String on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The String?
The String is created and hosted by WMOT/Roots Radio 89.5 FM.
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