
Caught here onstage in Berkeley, California, in February '23, Jake Eddy plays one of his solo flatpicking performances, which is a testament to his ability and confidence as a player.
These four young firebrands are kicking the doors of bluegrass guitar wide open.
The fine folk art of bluegrass flatpicking has probably never been on the minds of more music fans than it is today, thanks to the rise of Billy Strings as an arena-scale artist. His chops and musicality, combined with strong songwriting and a superb band, have made him a different kind of guitar hero—one whose own heroes include Doc Watson, Tony Rice, and Norman Blake.
Of course, Billy Strings isn’t the only picker of his generation inspired by the greats or making new things happen on the flattop with a flat pick. Molly Tuttle has emerged as the most influential woman in the field’s history, as a two-time International Bluegrass Music Association guitarist of the year and a Grammy Award winner. Impressive flatpickers Grant Gordy, Jake Stargel, Cody Kilby, Chris “Critter” Eldridge, Trey Hensley, Courtney Harman, and Jake Workman have also toured and recorded widely, contributing to the approach’s elevation.
So, who’s next? We looked into the talent pool of emerging flatpickers and asked some of today’s leading players who’s been impressing them. And we came up with this list of four young, dynamic musicians with bright futures—playing bluegrass guitar and then some.
Jake Eddy
When Jake Eddy recently moved into his new house, a few hundred feet from the home where he grew up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the first things he unpacked were a rug and the stereo. “And I laid on the rug, and I listened to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane and Manzanita [by the Tony Rice Unit]. And I cried my eyes out,” he says. Eddy offers this anecdote in a conversation about his musical passions and influences, and, sure enough, his growing body of work already includes abstract jazz, progressive string music, and traditional bluegrass.
What’s wild is how much this gregarious player and teacher has achieved by the age of 23. He’s visible and outspoken on Instagram and YouTube, and has a packed schedule of students. He plays gigs with mandolinist Andy Statman, one of the most sophisticated roots musicians out there, and he also has the nerve to perform live as a solo bluegrass flatpicker. Most everything about him feels unreasonably precocious and one-of-a-kind.
Eddy grew up in the bluegrass music world—a “festival rug rat”—and his abundant self-assurance seems to have shown itself early on. When he was just 14, the late road warrior Melvin Goins invited Eddy on the road, just as he had with a young Jason Carter years before the fiddler joined the Del McCoury Band. Jake’s family said okay, stipulating that his bluegrass picking grandfather go out as chaperone. Then, when the bass player quit, grandad stepped in and finished the tour. Jake actually played banjo in that band, “but I got to stand every night beside Junior Blankenship, who played guitar for Ralph Stanley.” So, to say it was a learning experience would be an understatement.
When the time came for college, Eddy had a scheme, which was to enroll in a music program, front load his music classes, and then split before the electives and humanities courses came due. (“I had always intended to quit,” he affirms.) His offramp was a job on the road playing guitar with the Becky Buller Band, which he did for a couple of seasons as the pandemic ban on touring lifted. Now, he’s independent again and focusing on his own identity as a player. That’s led to a self-titled debut EP, made in Nashville with Bryan Sutton and other bluegrass luminaries.
More recent, though, is his audacious solo album Live at Spanish Ballroom, recorded in Seattle with crafty takes on standards like “Beaumont Rag” and “Kentucky Waltz,” and plenty of magnetic stage banter to capture the feeling of being in the room with a self-assured storyteller. Solo flatpicking concerts are rare to say the least—virtuoso David Grier is one of the only guitarists to rise to the challenge—because it’s so hard to fill the musical space without support, but Eddy was born with a large dose of courage. “I never thought of it as limiting,” he says. “I thought it was cool.”
Jake Eddy’s Gear
Jake plays a 1951 Martin D-18, with D’Addario XS medium strings, and uses a ToneSlabs Tri XL 1.4 mm pick.
Luke Black
When Luke Black’s mother took him to a music store in first grade and urged him to pick up an instrument, he chose the banjo, thinking “it would be funny.” But he started something pretty serious that day, which led to a passion for bluegrass and a burgeoning career on the acoustic guitar. Black, now 20, is a swift and smooth flatpicker with an ambitious touring band, a degree from Berklee College of Music halfway complete, and a love of musical fusion and improvisation.
Black’s story is an endorsement of the local music scene around his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. It started at Fretted Instruments in the Homewood neighborhood, with Scruggs-style banjo lessons. Guitar came a few years later. His family wasn’t especially musical, but the store exposed him to a community, and “that ability to play with other musicians and feel that connection at a young age got me into it,” Black says.
What set him on his current trajectory, though, came after his first guitar teacher passed away. Luke saw that teacher’s son, a well-known regional picker and educator named Allen Tolbert, playing with his band at a nearby festival. “I went up to him after he played, and I was like, ‘Hey man, like, show me how to do this,’” and they were off. Tolbert introduced Black to the spacegrass universe of Tony Rice, and that approach was so influential that when he started his band, he adapted Rice’s model and called it the Mountain Grass Unit.
Playing mandolin and singing lead in the band is Drury Anderson, a lifelong friend and companion on Black’s bluegrass journey. “He was a big inspiration. We both just play off each other,” Black says. “We kind of started instruments at the same time, at the same music store. He picked up mandolin when I picked up banjo, and so we’ve been playing ‘Clinch Mountain Backstep’ together for like 12 years now.”
Black says he’s never been to the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, where newcomers tend to get noticed by the industry, but he and his buds started attending the smaller Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America winter conventions in Nashville. As old-school as that convention is, the jamming and the youth network helped him develop a personal vision. “After getting really involved in the bluegrass community, I started branching out. I mean, initially, it was just all Tony Rice,” he says. But he dove into Béla Fleck and Mike Marshall’s music, while young pickers such as Trey Hensley and Billy Strings offered contemporary inspiration. And don’t forget Jerry Garcia—there’s a Grateful Dead banner on his dorm-room wall at Berklee.
The Mountain Grass Unit is prepping for its second summer of touring with one album under its belt. Berklee’s showing him a variety of approaches and tightening up his music theory and jazz knowledge, but it’s safe to assume that we’ll see Black and his Unit following the Billy Strings trail on the jam circuit. “I really want to play as many genres as possible,” he says. “But my first language is definitely bluegrass.”
Luke Black’s Gear
Luke plays a Santa Cruz 1934 D, using 80/20 bronze Elixir strings with a BlueChip TAD 60 pick and an Elliott capo.
Alex Graf
Alex Graf’s bluegrass epiphany, or one of them, anyway, occurred at a festival performance by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder with Cody Kilby playing guitar. Alex was then a devoted jazz guitarist, planning for collegiate music studies, and the mystique of flatpicking had never revealed itself. Yet “it made instant sense to me,” he remembers. “The repertoire, the canon, the jamming, and that shared language. I was deep into Charlie Parker at that point. And I was like, ‘Holy cow, this is not the same,’ but it just resonates. I had never understood that.”
Even so, Graf, now 28, didn’t chase that Cody Kilby vibe for quite a few more years, developing what he jokes is a case of “late-onset bluegrass.” He buckled down after moving to Durango, Colorado, with his fiancée in 2017, and especially during the pandemic, when he learned solos from Tony Rice and Clarence White with the same focus and intent that he’d done for jazz solos years earlier. Today, Graf pursues a hybrid musical style with ’grass and jazz equally in reach, chiefly through his trio Tone Dog, with Tony Holmquist on mandolin and Silas Hamilton on bass. Separate from that, Graf self-produced a striking recent album of guitar tunes—original and traditional—called Sagebrush Continuum, a nod to the scrubby high desert where he lives, somewhere between sea level and his adopted state’s alpine peaks.
Tony Rice’s music, he says, “brought me into the world of bluegrass and new acoustic music. And something about it felt dangerous, like I wasn’t supposed to do that. So that made it really exciting. I became obsessed with taking the jazz stuff that I had and trying to reinterpret myself, or that understanding, through acoustic music and bluegrass.” Yet he’s never attended the IBMA convention or had contact with a thriving scene besides his friendship with Durango’s Stillhouse Junkies, who are signed to Nashville’s Dark Shadow label, so he’s in a good place to develop a sound all his own.
“I am chasing something,” he says, while stretching to define it. “A lot of it is coming through developing an improvisational language. I feel like every time I’m improvising, I’m getting a little bit closer to being able to express myself in the truest way. I know it’s a little woo-woo philosophical, but that’s kind of what drives me.”
Alex Graf’s Gear
Alex built his repertoire and recorded his album on a Taylor 100 Series acoustic, but he recently picked up a new Martin D-18. He plays D’Addario XS medium gauge strings with a BlueChip TAD 60.
Zeb Snyder
Twenty-seven-year-old Zeb Snyder has more miles under his tires and more albums in his discography than the other flatpickers in our story. He’s been playing the instrument for 20 years and touring since he was 12 with the Snyder Family Band, with his father Bud on bass and sister Samantha on fiddle. Since 2017, he’s been the youngest member of Appalachian Road Show, a hard-driving bluegrass band of veterans. And yet Snyder’s articulate, dynamic picking deserves to be better known.
Usually, family bluegrass bands are run by a patriarch, but the Snyders were a bottom-up operation. Zeb and Samantha started by taking youth lessons on classical guitar and violin, but growing up in Lexington, North Carolina, their listening tastes ran to country and bluegrass, so they started picking at local events. “The more lead guitar I started playing, and the more serious we got, we wanted somebody else to play with us. So, we asked Dad to play bass,” Zeb says.
Thing is, Bud hadn’t played since high school, so Zeb taught himself the instrument and then taught his dad how to play parts he and Samantha were coming up with, song by song. “My Dad was working a full-time job the entire time, so he didn’t have time to really study it. He always played what I taught him.” Meanwhile, Zeb and Samantha worked together on songs—she with her lyric focus and him with his instrumental chops. “So, my sister and I led the whole thing.”
Remarkably, the Snyders put out a string of independent albums and then got signed to a bluegrass label, where they issued two more … all before the youngsters reached college age. Moreover, they were pretty funky, in the vein of Nickel Creek, but that didn’t determine Zeb’s future as a bluegrass artist. When the Snyders wound down, he was taken on the road by the traditional and blues-minded mandolinist Darrell Webb. Then, Webb soon conspired with two former members of Mountain Heart to create Appalachian Road Show, a semi-conceptual band that weaves narrative and wardrobe into its throwback vibe.
Initially, the Road Show brought in hired guns for its first album, so newcomer Zeb played second to Bryan Sutton during the sessions, which he regards as “transformative” in his guitar education. Since then, he’s cultivated his bluegrass with a hybrid right-hand picking style adapted from the late electric-guitar wizard Danny Gatton.
“We take great care to protect this Appalachian Road Show vision and be really specific about what each individual song needs to sound like,” Zeb says. Whether a tune calls for a Doc Watson touch or Travis-style picking, or something else from the tradition, he’s got that in his bag. “The family band was progressive and original, and ‘let’s see what kind of weird stuff we can come up with.’ And this is a more subtle, directed kind of creativity,” he says.
Zeb Snyder’s Gear
Zeb plays a 1955 Martin D-28 that once belonged to Phil Rosenthal of the Seldom Scene, strung with D’Addario XT medium gauge phosphor bronze strings. He uses a BlueChip TAD 45 pick and a McKinney-Elliott capo he’s had since he was 13.
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“Get It Right, Get It Fast”: Jerry Douglas on Bluegrass History and Session Secrets
The legendary Dobro player talks about how to get session work, working with Allison Kraus, and the “baton pass” involved in recording great songs.
Bluegrass music is bigger than a genre. It’s become an entire world of ideas and feelings in the popular American imagination. And musician Jerry Douglas has been a key part of its celebration and revival over the past 30 years. “It's an old form of music that came from people in the south playing on the porch and became this juggernaut of a genre,” says Douglas. “It’s a character. It's a physical music.”
Douglas has racked up an impressive cabinet of accolades, including Grammys, American Music Association Awards, and International Bluegrass Music Association Awards. He’s been dubbed the CMA Awards’ Musician of the Year three times, and played with everyone from Allison Krauss and Elvis Costello to Bela Fleck and John Fogerty. He’s an encyclopedic guide to contemporary American roots music, and on this episode of Wong Notes, he walks Cory Wong through the most important moments in his 50-year career.
Tune in to hear Douglas’ assessment of bluegrass’ demanding nature (“Honestly, there's not so many genres nowadays that require as much technical facility as something like bluegrass”), what’s required of roots players (“Get it right, get it fast, make it hook”), and why the O Brother, Where Are Thou? soundtrack connected with so many listeners. Wondering how to get involved with session work? Douglas says there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and what worked for him might not work today. The key is to be dynamic—and know when to keep your mouth shut.
There are plenty of gems in this interview, like Douglas’ thoughts on what makes a good solo, but the most significant might be Douglas’ big takeaway from decades of sitting in on communal roots-music sessions. “We can play in all genres,” says Douglas. “We just have to listen.”
Listen to the new track from Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, and Steve Vai's G3 Reunion Live.
Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, and Steve Vai returned to the G3 touring concept in 2024 for a sold-out US tour. This was the original G3 lineup that saw the three virtuosos first share a stage back in 1996. Each guitarist plays a full set with their own band and then the three join together for an encore jam.
"G3 Reunion Live" is much more than “just” a live album. It’s a full album-length set from each artist plus a collaborative supergroup LP. The deluxe edition features a different colored vinyl for each artist, a special splatter LP for the encore jam, and a 64-page photo book, divided into artist and jam chapters, with the full program also on 2 CDs. It is also available in a 2CD digipak with a 16-page photo booklet, 4 LP gatefold and digital download.
For more information, please visit satriani.com.
Restoring a Romantic-Era Acoustic with Ties to the U.S. Presidency
These before (left) and after (right) shots demonstrate only a fraction of the restoration process our columnist carried out.
This centuries-old instrument, which belonged to the daughter-in-law of President Andrew Jackson, has witnessed almost 200 years of American history.
We tend to think of “history” as something we read about or learn from our elders, rather than something we live and contribute to. I’ve often wondered if my great-uncle knew he was making history when, as a Mexican immigrant, he built the original Mickey Mouse guitar for Walt Disney in the early 1950s.
Last year, I was contacted by Jennifer Schmidt, the collections manager at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. They were seeking a grant with the hopes of restoring an acoustic guitar on the property. It was the guitar that was owned by Sarah Yorke Jackson, White House hostess and acting first lady of the United States from November 1834 to March 1837, and daughter-in-law to America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson. The Hermitage is the historic home of President Andrew Jackson located in a neighborhood just east of metropolitan Nashville.
When I arrived at the home to inspect the guitar, it was leaning against a chair in the living room, in desperate need of repair. It had been “restored” previously by a violin luthier in 1983, and while their work helped sustain the shape of the instrument, there were many repairs that had been done incorrectly.
I quickly saw that this was going to be a combination of a restoration and preservation project. There was a history written up on the guitar, but I believe it to be incorrectly documented that the luthier was Cabasse-Visnaire l'Aîné, who worked in the Mirecourt region of France during the early 1800s. Despite bearing some similarities, later guitars that are credited to Cabasse-Visnaire have a different style in building.
Based on the design, I believe the instrument was crafted by Petitjean l'Aîné in 1817. Another luthier from the region, Didier Nicolas l'Aîné, was also active in that period, but there are differences in his building decisions that have led me to this belief. Didier was known for his one-piece maple backs on his guitars, while Petitjean l'Aîné was known for laminating the backs of his guitars, and this guitar has a spruce back with a laminate. He also built in a style that was complementary to Didier—a nice way of saying he appears to copy his style in headstock and design.
“I couldn’t stop thinking of the story this instrument could tell—all it had endured and been privy to, the suffering it witnessed and the joy it gave.”
This guitar is considered a “Romantic” guitar, made during the era of 1790 to 1830. It features a Norway spruce top, most likely harvested in the French alps. The fretboard is African ebony, with a 646 mm scale. The back is laminated spruce and the sides are rosewood, with the outer laminate appearing to be pearwood.
The guitar needed a great amount of work. The issues and repairs included top cracks, loose perfling and braces, bridge lifting, binding and inlay missing, separated back, missing and incorrect frets, neck reset, missing top-hat pegs, and, to top it off, a fretboard held on by Scotch tape. When the instrument was finally delivered to us, it took several months before I could clear my schedule to dedicate time to the repair. The repair itself took several weeks to complete, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the story this instrument could tell—all it had endured and been privy to, the suffering it witnessed and the joy it gave to either Sarah while she played it or the audience she may have played it for. As musicians, we all tend to think beyond just the physical attributes of a musical instrument. We use words like feel, touch, voice, warmth. We use these terms because the instrument is expressing something that we lack the words or ability to express without it.
This guitar lived through the formation of the Democratic Party, the origins of the Spoils System, and the Indian Removal Act, which created the Trail of Tears. All of the pain and suffering, as well as the victories and joys, that were absorbed into this instrument have shaped its sound and presence, and to think that it crossed my path, a first-generation Mexican-American born in the United States. I am honored at the opportunity to help preserve a small piece of our American history.
I have worked on countless instruments that have historic musical relevance, but this guitar was different. We have a tagline for Delgado Guitars: “Does your guitar have a story?” I created this tagline because I believe every person has a valuable and important story to tell. Now, I’m grateful to have helped preserve this amazing guitar for future generations to see as they visit the Hermitage. I even built a custom stand from wood that came from the property. You can see more of the steps in the restoration on our social media pages if interested, but if you find yourself in Nashville, please stop by the Hermitage and pay it a visit. It might inspire you to share your story.
PG contributor Zach Wish demos Orangewood's Juniper Live, an all-new parlor model developed with a rubber-lined saddle. The Juniper Live is built for a clean muted tone, modern functionality, and stage-ready performance.
Orangewood Juniper Live Acoustic Guitar
- Equipped with a high-output rail pickup (Alnico 5)
- Vintage-inspired design: trapeze tailpiece, double-bound body, 3-ply pickguard, and a cupcake knob
- Grover open-gear tuners for reliable performanceReinforced non-scalloped X bracing
- Headstock truss rod access, allowing for neck relief and adjustment
- Light gauge flatwound strings for added tonal textures