Tonight on JamFest | All Things Considered Live at 7 PM | NewGrass Radio Show at 9 PM
Jamfest Weekly Roundup
There are two kinds of evenings in the live music world. The first kind asks you to show up, receive what is being offered, and go home entertained. The second kind asks something more of you. It asks you to sit with the music, to let it locate something inside you that you did not necessarily know needed locating, to feel the weight and the history and the living presence of an art form that has been building itself across generations and is still, tonight, still becoming. Tonight at JamFest, we are offering the second kind. Twice.
Beginning at 7:00 PM, All Things Considered Live brings you inside one of the most legendary performances in American festival history: B.B. King at the Newport Folk Festival in 1989. By the time that broadcast gives way to the NewGrass Radio Show at 9:00 PM, we will have moved through nearly the entire spectrum of what American roots music is and what it is continuing to become. This is a night for listeners who understand that the blues and the banjo, the Newport stage and the newgrass festival field, and the archive alongside the brand-new album dropping this Friday are all connected, all telling the same story, and that story has never been more alive than it is right now. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
“Jam Band July” and Sweet Relief: The Community That Takes Care of Its Own
Sweet Relief Musicians Fund has launched a month-long online charity auction called Jam Band July, and the initiative deserves more attention than it typically receives from music publications that cover the news without exploring the deeper story behind it.
The auction features autographed vinyl, festival VIP packages, and memorabilia donated directly by Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, and John Mayer. That is a collection of names representing billions of combined streams and decades of live music experience. The artists giving back through this auction are not doing so for publicity. They are doing so because the community of musicians, crew members, and music industry workers that Sweet Relief serves has always operated as an extended family, and the jam and roots community has historically understood the obligations that family membership carries. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Sienna Spiro at Austin City Limits: A Twenty-Year-Old Introduction to the Future
In the world of singer-songwriters and the NPR-adjacent live performance space that All Things Considered Live inhabits so comfortably, one of the week’s most compelling stories belongs to someone who has not yet had years of career to reflect on. That is precisely what makes her arrival so exciting.
Sienna Spiro is twenty years old, British, and making her Austin City Limits debut with a global livestream that will showcase tracks from her new album Visitor to an audience reaching far beyond any physical venue. Austin City Limits is the longest-running music performance series in American television history, and the decision to bring a twenty-year-old British singer-songwriter into that lineage for Season 52 is a statement about both the quality of her work and the show’s continued commitment to finding artists who matter before the rest of the world has fully caught up with them. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Jason Newsted, Blackberry Smoke, and the Beautiful Unpredictability of Live Music
Not every story in a week like this one needs to carry the weight of institutional significance or decade-long artistic development. Some stories exist simply to remind us that live music is capable of producing moments that nobody planned, and that the best surprises in this world come from musicians who love music enough to say yes when the opportunity presents itself unexpectedly.
Jason Newsted, the bassist whose decade with Metallica placed him in one of the most commercially successful and culturally significant metal bands in history, is currently on the road with his acoustic and roots-oriented project The Chophouse Band. The venture reflects the range of musical interests that have always existed beneath the public image shaped by his years in one of the loudest and fastest bands on the planet. At a recent tour stop, Newsted walked on stage with Southern rock stalwarts Blackberry Smoke for an encore performance that included a full-throttle version of Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” a song that occupies a specific and beloved corner of the hard rock canon sitting at the exact intersection of both artists’ musical worlds. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
All Things Considered Live at 7 PM: B.B. King at the Newport Folk Festival, 1989
There is no more direct path to the emotional and artistic foundation of American music than the Newport Folk Festival, and there is no more revealing entry point into that tradition than a B.B. King performance at his absolute peak. Tonight at 7:00 PM, All Things Considered Live delivers exactly that. The weekly radio program brings listeners exclusive live performances and musical highlights recorded by NPR Music at iconic venues and festivals across the country, and tonight it delivers B.B. King on the Newport Folk Festival stage in 1989, captured in the full depth and presence of a live recording that has lost none of its power in the decades since it was made.
All Things Considered Live exists precisely for evenings like this one. The show is built around the understanding that the most important music is music that breathes, that responds to its audience, that exists in a specific time and place and cannot be fully reproduced in a studio regardless of how sophisticated the production becomes. NPR Music has documented these moments at iconic venues and festivals across the country for decades, and the archive contains performances ranging from emerging artists finding their voice for the first time on a major stage to established legends delivering definitive statements of their entire artistic lives. It is one of the most significant records of American live music culture that exists anywhere. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
NewGrass Radio at 9 PM: Where the Tradition Lives Forward
When the All Things Considered Live broadcast closes at 9:00 PM and the NewGrass Radio Show takes over the signal, the music continues without interruption in the deepest sense. What newgrass is, at its core, is exactly what B.B. King was doing at Newport: taking a tradition built across generations and finding within it something alive, something responsive, something that belongs to right now without abandoning where it came from. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
The Week in American Roots: Everything Is Moving at Once
Before we go deeper into tonight’s programming, we need to spend some serious time with the week’s biggest stories. The past several days have produced an avalanche of news across the bluegrass, newgrass, Americana, and roots music landscape that collectively paint a portrait of a genre family in full creative and institutional bloom.
The IBMA Moves to Chattanooga and Sets the Stage for a Historic Fall
The single most consequential institutional development in the bluegrass world this week is also the freshest. Just today, July 13, 2026, the International Bluegrass Music Association revealed the official lineup for its reimagined IBMA Bluegrass Live! festival, now relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for an October 23 and 24 event that represents a genuine reinvention of one of the most important annual gatherings in the genre.
The move away from Raleigh, North Carolina, where IBMA World of Bluegrass had built deep roots and a loyal regional audience over many years, is not a small decision. Festival relocation carries enormous logistical, cultural, and emotional weight, and the choice of Chattanooga as the new home for IBMA Bluegrass Live! signals an intentional repositioning of the festival within the broader Southern cultural landscape. Chattanooga has been developing a serious and well-organized live music infrastructure, and bringing IBMA’s flagship festival event to the city represents a meaningful endorsement of that development and an investment in building a new regional bluegrass community around what had previously been a Raleigh-centered institution. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Lindsay Lou’s “Bluegrass Women”: A Super-Collaboration That Could Reshape a Conversation
If the IBMA news is the institutional story of the week, then Lindsay Lou’s announcement of Bluegrass Women is the artistic story, and it is one that deserves to be told with all the attention and seriousness it merits.
Dropping August 14, 2026, Bluegrass Women is a collaborative album project built around a vision that is deceptively simple and genuinely powerful: a celebration of female songwriting in the bluegrass and roots tradition, performed and recorded by a collective of some of the most gifted women in contemporary American acoustic music. The guest roster that Lou has assembled is, by any reasonable assessment, extraordinary. Sierra Hull, whose mandolin virtuosity has been redefining what the instrument is capable of for over two decades. Molly Tuttle, a guitarist and songwriter who won the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year award multiple times and whose solo work has demonstrated an artistic range extending from deep traditional bluegrass into Americana and singer-songwriter territory with equal mastery. Aoife O’Donovan, whose musical intelligence and compositional sophistication place her in a category of her own within the broader Americana landscape. Sarah Jarosz, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose discography represents one of the most consistently excellent bodies of work in contemporary roots music. And Alison Brown, whose banjo playing is as technically accomplished and harmonically adventurous as the instrument has ever produced. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Billy Strings Sells Out the Summer, Livestreams Every Night, and Keeps Growing
It is almost impossible to discuss the current state of bluegrass and newgrass without immediately discussing Billy Strings, because he has positioned himself so completely at the center of the genre’s popular moment that any attempt to describe the landscape without him at the center would be like describing a solar system by focusing on the planets. His summer tour begins tomorrow, July 14, in Roanoke, Virginia, and it is entirely sold out. For a tour of this scale, spanning major markets across the country and culminating in arena-level venues, that is a statement about his commercial ascent that would have been difficult to predict even three years ago. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Steep Canyon Rangers and the Return to Raw Roots: “Next Act” Is a Declaration
There is a particular kind of artistic courage that sometimes gets less attention than the more dramatic forms. It is the courage of a successful band to simplify rather than complicate, to strip back rather than add on, to return to something essential rather than continuing to expand in the directions that success makes most comfortable and commercially safe. The Steep Canyon Rangers have that kind of courage, and their new album Next Act is its most direct expression to date.
The Rangers have been explicit about what Next Act represents: a deliberate creative return to raw, traditional bluegrass and acoustic roots. After years of expanding their sound into Americana territory, after their celebrated collaboration with comedian and banjoist Steve Martin brought them to audiences who might not otherwise have found their way into bluegrass, after the Grammy recognition and the mainstream visibility, the Steep Canyon Rangers looked at where they were and decided that the most honest and necessary thing they could do was go back to where they started. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Old Crow Medicine Show Gets Chance McCoy Back: A Family Reunites
News arrived this week that Chance McCoy has officially returned to Old Crow Medicine Show as a full-time touring member after a six-year absence during which he pursued solo work with the focus and seriousness that genuine artistic development requires. The reunion is significant both personally and symbolically. McCoy’s musical voice is woven into some of Old Crow’s most beloved material from his years with the band, and his return serves as a reminder that the extended families of American roots music have a gravitational pull that eventually draws people back toward each other.
McCoy himself has acknowledged the particular reality of rejoining a band in the middle of a major national summer tour with characteristic directness. There is no gentle on-ramp available, no gradual reintroduction to the touring life. You get on the bus, and the next night you are on stage in front of thousands of people who have been listening to your work for years and have their own deep feelings about how it should sound. That is demanding and thrilling in equal measure, and the fact that McCoy embraced it rather than waiting for a more controlled reentry point says something about his confidence in the musical relationship and his readiness to be fully back. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
Why Tonight’s Programming Is the Heart of What JamFest Does
B.B. King at Newport 1989 and the NewGrass Radio Show at 9:00 PM are not adjacent programming blocks that happen to share a Sunday evening. They are expressions of a single, continuous argument about American music, an argument that tonight’s JamFest broadcast is making with great care and complete conviction.
The argument goes something like this. The blues and the banjo, the acoustic guitar and the electric guitar, the Newport Folk Festival stage and the festival field where Billy Strings sells out an arena tour stop before it has been on sale for a week, the founding legend and the twenty-year-old singer-songwriter making her Austin City Limits debut, the traditional song and the improvisational excursion that starts from that song and travels thirty years into unknown territory before finding its way home: all of this is one music. It has multiple voices and multiple homes and multiple generations of practitioners, but it is one music, built from the same emotional raw material, asking the same questions, searching for the same things, finding them in different ways at different times in different rooms and on different radio waves. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
All Things Considered Live and the NewGrass Radio Show exist to honor that continuity. They exist to take the archive seriously and the present moment seriously and to treat listeners as people capable of holding both at once. As people who can sit with B.B. King at Newport 1989 at 7:00 PM and be fully present for Lindsay Lou and Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull and the entire alive and breathing present moment of American roots music by 9:00.
That is the JamFest promise every week, on every show, across every genre and generation we cover. Tonight, we are keeping it in the most direct and satisfying way we know how.
Turn up the signal. The music is already playing. Read the Full Article on the JamFest Substack!
JamFest | All Things Considered Live every Sunday at 7 PM, featuring live performances and musical highlights from NPR Music at iconic venues and festivals nationwide. NewGrass Radio Show at 9 PM, where tradition meets innovation in American roots music, from the founding legends of bluegrass to the adventurous spirit of today’s newgrass pioneers.
JamFest — Your home for live music news, festival culture, tour announcements, and the stories behind the scenes and the songs. Keep the spirit alive.
Coming Up on JamFest
🎵 All Things Considered Live— Mondays at 7 PM EST
🎵 NewGrass Radio — Mondays at 7 PM EST
🎵 Live Nuggets — Tuesdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 NRN Radio Show — Wednesdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 Festival Radio Show — Thursdays at 9 PM EST
🎵 What is Hip?! — Fridays at 10 PM EST
🎵 Club Night — Saturdays at 10 PM EST
🎵 Sunday Spunday — Sundays at 2 AM EST
🎵 Gospel Lunch — Sundays at 12:30 PM EST
🎵 Project Reggaeologist — Sundays at 10 PM EST
Stay tuned to JamFest for breaking music news, concert coverage, festival updates, tour announcements, and the greatest live recordings ever captured.