The music drifted down from Appalachia, from the front porches of English and Scottish immigrants who plucked and strummed the string instruments of their homelands. Along the way, someone added ...

An acoustic guitar is usually a staple of a mellow show, but Billy Strings shredded bluegrass tunes into his acoustic Saturday night with the hair-flipping energy of a rock star. Just looking at the ...

If you’ve never seen or heard Billy Strings and his band, you might initially mistake them for a traditional bluegrass unit. The instruments are what you’d expect—banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass and ...

Billy Strings may be the most controversial name in bluegrass, playing blazing leads on acoustic and distorted electric guitar, an instrument frowned upon by the genre’s hardcore traditionalists. But ...

In the early days of bluegrass music, two companies were largely responsible for creating that sound – Martin, for its guitars, and Gibson, for its mandolins and banjos. Even today, bluegrass ...

DelFest, the annual event hosted by Del McCoury, is often described as a bluegrass festival, even though only a minority of the acts are traditional bluegrass bands. Many a casual observer assumes ...

PITTSBURGH ― Just when you think he can't strum his guitar any faster, Billy Strings digs deeper within and finds an even faster gear. Strings' supersonic yet smooth shredding electrified Tuesday's ...

In his mid-teens, Billy Strings was the lead guitarist in a Grand Rapids, Michigan, prog-rock band called A Day of Moments. He was a high school dropout and hadn’t touched an acoustic guitar in years.

Hopping off the tailgate of his Sprinter touring van, Billy Strings readies himself for a rollicking set at the inaugural Railbird festival in Lexington, Kentucky. The six-string virtuoso grabs his ...