JamFest • New Release • October 16, 2026

Béla Fleck Releases Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman and Shares an Unreleased “Strider” Video Featuring Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle

Béla Fleck • Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman • JamFestRadio.com

A blizzard nearly stopped it. A sold-out Ryman Auditorium showed up anyway. Now the full recording is here, and the video of “Strider” with Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle makes the case for why that January night in Nashville was something genuinely historic.

Béla Fleck released Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman on October 16, 2026, and the release of this live album is one of those archival events that the acoustic music world has been anticipating since the night it documents actually happened. The concert was recorded on January 8, 2022, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and the gathering Fleck assembled for that evening represented something close to a comprehensive statement about where bluegrass music was at that specific moment: multiple generations of the form’s most accomplished practitioners sharing a stage that has been the symbolic home of American acoustic music for more than eighty years, playing material from My Bluegrass Heart, the studio album that won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album later that year.

The backstory of the concert itself adds a layer of meaning that the album now carries with it permanently. A massive East Coast winter storm disrupted travel across the region in the days leading up to the show, forcing a postponement from the original date and stranding several musicians who had been scheduled to appear. Chris Thile, whose mandolin playing would have been a natural part of any gathering of this kind, was among those who could not make it through the weather. Despite the disruption and despite the storm, the musicians who could reach Nashville did, and a sold-out crowd packed the Ryman, the building its devotees have always called the Mother Church of Country Music, for what turned out to be an explosive night of picking that now exists in its complete form as a two-CD and three-LP vinyl document. The fact that the show nearly did not happen makes the recording feel even more precious than it would have otherwise, evidence of what was saved from cancellation by the collective stubbornness of musicians and audiences who understood that some nights are worth the inconvenience.

The roster Fleck assembled for the evening reflects the full depth of his relationships across the bluegrass world. Sam Bush, whose mandolin work has been foundational to the progressive bluegrass tradition since the New Grass Revival in the 1970s, appeared alongside Jerry Douglas, whose Dobro playing has defined the sound of acoustic Americana for decades. Michael Cleveland, one of the most technically formidable fiddlers in the contemporary bluegrass world, brought a ferocity and a precision to the ensemble that the recording captures with full clarity. And Billy Strings, whose own career has been one of the most remarkable stories in the entire acoustic music world over the past several years, appeared as a figure who represents the exact generational continuity that Fleck was documenting. These are musicians who have been in conversation with each other across decades of recording and performing, and the Ryman gave them a stage worthy of that conversation.

The “Strider” video that Fleck released alongside the physical drop of the album tells a specific and important story within the larger story of the evening. When Fleck was writing and recording My Bluegrass Heart, he became aware that the history of bluegrass, and specifically the way that history tended to be assembled and presented, leaned heavily toward male musicians. He made a deliberate decision to bring Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle into both the studio recording and the Ryman performance, not as guests filling out a bill but as central artistic voices whose contributions would be essential to what the project was trying to say about where the tradition was and where it was going. Hull’s mandolin work is among the most technically accomplished in any acoustic genre, and her ability to bring that technical command into service of an emotionally present and musically generous ensemble performance is exactly what distinguishes a great session musician from an artist. Tuttle’s flatpicking guitar has similarly redefined what is possible on that instrument within the bluegrass and Americana traditions, building a reputation as one of the most complete musicians of her generation across a body of work that encompasses studio recordings, live performances, and the collaborative relationships she has maintained with the full range of the progressive acoustic world.

“Strider” captures the specific sub-collective of Fleck, Hull, and Tuttle in a performance that is blazing and precise and joyful in the way that the best high-energy acoustic music always is, three musicians who have each spent their careers developing their technical command of their instruments bringing that command to bear on a single piece of music simultaneously, in a room that rewards that kind of playing with the specific acoustics and the specific audience attention that the Ryman has always provided. The video makes visible what the audio recording already made audible: that this was a night of music at the highest level the tradition is capable of producing, documented in a form that will still be worth hearing decades from now.

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A blizzard, a sold-out room, three generations of bluegrass royalty, and a recording that proves the Mother Church still knows exactly what it is for.