I grew up in Durham, NC in the 1970s, the America of Star Wars, the Six Million Dollar Man, and Richard Petty. My first exposure to music was classical at home and commercial FM rock radio. My Mom played the harp, and both my parents love opera, symphonic and chamber music. They started me on the violin at age 7, and I took lessons for about eight years. Along the way I branched out. I discovered college radio on “the left end of the dial” just before the dawn of REM and U2. I got my first record player with stereo speakers before junior high. My early interest in jazz led me to study bass and drums. I played in a high school garage band and then in several working pop/rock bands during my collegiate years in Chicago. I became a hobbyist more than a performer and a devoted fan of music broadly. 

I started journalism as an op-ed writer on politics and society as a graduate student in the early 1990s. My expertise was public policy, media studies, and the costs/benefits of high tech health care. That took me to Washington DC where I was a credentialed Capitol Hill reporter/editor covering health reform during the Clinton administration. Then, after moving to Nashville in 1996, where I edited a health care business and policy magazine, I began writing about that subject much closer to my heart - music.

In 1998, I sold my first reported essay to the arts page of the Wall Street Journal - an analysis of the emergent "Americana" radio format and how it represented a new lane for artists working in traditional country and bluegrass genres that were no longer being given a chance at commercial radio. I began a multi-year relationship with the Journal, publishing about two dozen essays. My long-distance editor there became my wonderful wife, but that’s another story.

By then I’d settled on guitar as my instrument, inspired in college by Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Tony Rice. I taught myself a variety of styles, including country blues, bluegrass, and jazz. In Nashville, I discovered a welcoming and vivacious community. I made relationships with musicians, producers, songwriters, and aspiring recording artists, including playing bluegrass at clubs downtown with a young Dierks Bentley. I also sought out elders of Nashville, including some figures from early WSM radio and the Grand Ole Opry. Their openness to my inquiries made my first book possible - Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City. 

I began writing features and reviews for key roots music magazines, chiefly No Depression, Acoustic Guitar, Performing Songwriter, and Country Music. Then in 2000, I was able to land the position of Music Writer at the Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper. For almost four years there, I wrote widely about the art, commerce, and technology of music, including the advent of Napster and the crash of the industry that ensued. 

Harkening back to my first forays into journalism - which studied systems, economics, sociology, history, and innovation, I aimed to become a music journalist who could see patterns, challenge conventional wisdom, and be of service to anyone championing better music to the mainstream market. For my work at the newspaper I was granted the Charlie Lamb Award For Country Music Journalism (since renamed the Chet Flippo Award). 

Since 2000, I've covered music in a variety of forums and media as I expanded into radio and video production. I wrote a documentary for and with Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville that appeared on A&E, and I produced a series of films that play at the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, NC. Several of my films screened at the Nashville Film Festival. I'm especially proud of my deep relationship with the bluegrass community, where I've won IBMA Awards for Best Liner Notes and Writer of the Year (2024). 

Between 2006 and 2018, all years of freelancing, I became a founding producer and co-host on a famous but now late, great weekly live radio series called Music City Roots. We were syndicated over about 30 radio stations, and I produced five seasons of an MCR television series for American Public Media. I made many valuable musical relationships and built an audience for my writing and broadcasting through that show. Now I work full time as a radio producer and interview host for WMOT, an Americana radio station and 50-year NPR affiliate in Nashville.

LINK TO MY ONGOING WORK AT WMOT

With background and relationships in classical, jazz, and roots music, I understand many music ecosystems and I know how musicians think, practice, and pursue their art. I never stop learning from them. They tell me that I have a good understanding of what they do and that my takes on their field are fair, thoughtful, and insightful. I live to serve them and to build their audience. I regard what they do as spiritual work that holds our fractured society together and that drives positive change at the collective and individual level.