My Ghost Vapes

The fiddle came back by two roads

Tyler Childers, Billy Strings and a wave of kids with acoustic guitars are filling arenas with music that is a hundred years old. It got here from two directions, the mountains and Texas.

, 9 minute read

On September 27, 2025, Zach Bryan played to 112,408 people at Michigan Stadium. It was the biggest ticketed concert in the history of the United States. The record he broke belonged to George Strait.

That same year a bluegrass guitar player from Michigan was headlining a 21,000-seat arena in Denver. A few months later a songwriter from the coalfields of eastern Kentucky won his first Grammy.

Fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars are filling the biggest rooms in the country right now. The music is about a hundred years old. It got here by two roads.

My favorite karaoke song is “Shake the Frost.”

I have only ever sung it at The Locker Room, a dive bar on Richmond’s Southside. I get the feeling they don’t care too much for the country vibe, but I don’t care. When I nail Tyler’s soulful Appalachian growl and rasp, with the pain and conviction that only come from losing true love, they feel it.

I came up on R&B. As a lover boy and, subsequently, a sad boy, anything that communicates the language of the heart is where I like to be. This music does.

The song

“Shake the Frost” is not on any of Tyler Childers’s studio albums. It is the first track on Live on Red Barn Radio, two short sets he recorded for a Kentucky radio show and put out in 2013 and 2014. One set has his band at the time, the Highwall. The other is just him and a guitar.

At first those recordings were a regional thing. People in Kentucky and West Virginia knew. Everybody else got them in 2018, when they were reissued after he broke.

The mountain road

Childers was born in 1991 in Lawrence County, Kentucky. His father worked in the coal industry and his mother is a nurse.

His breakthrough was Purgatory in 2017. It was produced by Sturgill Simpson, another eastern Kentucky native, along with David Ferguson, and it went platinum. Three years later Childers put out Long Violent History, an album made up mostly of traditional fiddle tunes. In February 2026 he finally won a Grammy, after nine nominations without one.

The sound he grew up inside is older than the record business. Settlers from Britain and Ireland brought their ballads and fiddle tunes into the Appalachians in the 1700s. Black musicians brought the banjo. The two traditions grew together in the mountains for a century and a half before anybody recorded them.

Then somebody did. In the summer of 1927 a producer named Ralph Peer set up recording equipment in a hat company building on State Street in Bristol, the street that is the state line between Tennessee and Virginia. In about two weeks he recorded the Carter Family, who had come over from Maces Spring, Virginia, and a singer named Jimmie Rodgers. People call those sessions the Big Bang of country music.

Bluegrass came next. It is named for a band: Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, out of Kentucky. The lineup Monroe had from 1946 to 1948, with Lester Flatt on guitar and Earl Scruggs on banjo, is the one people call the original bluegrass band. Scruggs played with a three-finger roll fast enough to keep up with Monroe, and the banjo has sounded like that ever since.

Virginia is all over this. The Carters were from Scott County. Ralph Stanley was from Dickenson County, and he and his brother Carter started the Stanley Brothers in 1946. In 2000, in his seventies, Ralph sang “O Death” for the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? and won a Grammy for it.

That brings us to Billy Strings. He was born William Apostol in Lansing, Michigan, and grew up in Morehead, Kentucky, and then the small town of Muir, Michigan. His stepfather, Terry Barber, was a bluegrass picker who raised him on Doc Watson, Del McCoury and Bill Monroe. As a teenager he played in hard rock bands.

Now he has three Grammys for Best Bluegrass Album and plays arenas. In 2022 he made a record with Terry called Me/and/Dad. His newest, So Much for Goodbyes, came out in August 2026. He co-produced it with T Bone Burnett, the man who produced the O Brother soundtrack.

He also broke his leg in April 2026 doing a skateboard trick backstage in Charlottesville, which is the most on-brand injury this site could ask for.

The Texas road

The other road starts with people leaving Nashville.

In 1971 Willie Nelson quit Nashville and went home to Texas. He fell in with writers like Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joe Shaver, in the same world as Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. They stripped out the strings and the polish, added some rock and roll, and insisted on making their own records their own way. It got called outlaw country. In 1976 the compilation Wanted! The Outlaws became the first country album ever certified platinum.

North of the Red River, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a scene grew up that got named for the color of the soil: red dirt. For two decades its center was a two-story house everybody called The Farm, until it burned in 2003. The Turnpike Troubadours came out of that tradition in 2005, from Tahlequah, Oklahoma. They went quiet in 2019 and came back in 2022.

Then came Zach Bryan, raised in Oologah, Oklahoma. He spent eight years in the Navy. He recorded his first viral song outside his barracks and made his first album with friends in an Airbnb. Six years later he was standing in front of 112,408 people.

The argument in the middle

In between the mountains and Texas there is a long fight over what to call any of this.

In 1990 a band from Illinois called Uncle Tupelo put out an album called No Depression, named after a Carter Family song. It usually gets credited as the first alt-country record. The music that followed needed a shelf in the record store, and the shelf got named Americana. The Americana Music Association was founded in 1999.

Tyler Childers does not love the word. Accepting an award from that same association in 2018, he said: “As a man who identifies as a country music singer, I feel Americana ain’t no part of nothing and is a distraction from the issues that we’re facing.”

Call it what you want. On this site it goes under Y’alternative.

The kids with phones

Here is the part that makes this a renaissance and not a revival. The newest names are not from either place.

Evan Honer is from Surprise, Arizona. He was a college diver at California Baptist University. He went on American Idol in 2022 and Luke Bryan told him to stick to diving.

That December he and a singer named Julia DiGrazia released a cover of “Jersey Giant,” a song Tyler Childers wrote years ago and never formally recorded. By the spring of 2025 it had 132 million streams on Spotify. Honer now runs his own label, Cloverdale Records. He has said it plainly: “Tyler Childers is part of the reason why I started doing music.”

Sam Barber is from Frohna, Missouri. He was born in 2003. At 16 he picked up a guitar that had belonged to his great-grandfather. He started posting songs on TikTok in 2021 while he was studying civil engineering, and a song he wrote as a teenager, “Straight and Narrow,” got him a deal with Atlantic Records. He names two idols: Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers.

One from each road.

An Arizona diver and a Missouri engineering student did not grow up in a holler or a Texas dance hall. They grew up with every one of these songs a thumb away. The two roads met in a phone.

Richmond is in this too

You do not have to drive to Kentucky. A few from right here:

  • Cassidy Snider & the Wranglers. Blues at the bottom of it, with New Orleans piano on top and the Blue Ridge somewhere in between. Their album is called Losing Lovers.
  • Holy Roller. They started in 2013 under the name Big Mama Shakes and became Holy Roller in 2018. Good-time rock with country twang. Their latest record is Good Religion, and in March 2026 they packed The Camel two nights in a row.
  • Mackenzie Roark. Raised in Chesterfield, went off to James Madison, came back. Her band is called the Hotpants. Her first full-length, Rollin’ High, Feelin’ Low, came out in 2022 on the Richmond label Vocal Rest Records.
  • The Great Beforetimes. They describe what they do as “folk songs from the 9th apocalypse,” and I am not going to improve on that.

I don’t make it to a lot of shows, so I have not seen any of them yet. But I’ll be at the Richmond Folk Festival this weekend.

One accord

I just love the folk sound. In my opinion there is no sweeter sound than a fiddle, a six-string guitar, a mandolin and a banjo all working in one accord.

My family’s roots are mostly Scottish. When the Scots migrated to America, we naturally settled in the Appalachians. Unbeknownst to them, they had settled on terrain they already knew. The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees. Before this continent split from the rest, that mountain range ran up through what is now the Scottish Highlands.

The folk sounds of Scotland, meshed with what echoed through a holler, are what we know and love today. The struggle of an obstinately defiant people reverberates through history in the sound of string instruments and voices full of pain, faith and love.

So when a kid in Arizona learns a Tyler Childers song off his phone, he is picking up something that crossed an ocean to get to him. I think that is why they feel it at The Locker Room, too.

Sources