Referred to by Billboard Magazine as “One of Music Row’s greatest veteran tunesmiths,” Jerry Salley has had an exceptionally successful, multi award-winning songwriting career.  Nominated in 2019 for the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Salley is the 2018 & 2019 IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) Songwriter of the Year and was named the 2003 SESAC Country Music Songwriter of the Year.  An Ohio native, his home state honored his long, illustrious career in 2024 by inducting him into the Ohio Country Music Hall of Fame.  Salley has had over 560 different songs recorded and his songs have sold in excess of 19 million records worldwide.  Writing and singing in Nashville since 1982, he has written multiple hits in country, bluegrass, and gospel music and may well be the most successful songwriter to have earned equal recognition from all three genres of music. Jerry was a 2020 GRAMMY nominated producer in the Gospel Roots category for producing the multi-artist project, Gonna Sing, Gonna Shout, on Billy Blue Records.  He also produced the popular Dolly Parton single, a new version of the old Gospel Hymn, “In The Sweet By And By”, released as part of the Country Faith Bluegrass project in 2021, which received two 2022 IBMA Awards (Gospel Recording of the Year and Collaborative Recording of the Year), and the 2022 Dove Award for Bluegrass/Country/Roots Song of the Year.  He currently has a popular song, “It Takes A Woman”, on the new Chris Stapleton album Higher.

Jerry’s country music successes began in the late 1980s when the group Wild Rose recorded “Breakin’ New Ground”.  Since then, countless country music stars have recorded his songs, including Reba McEntire (“I’m Gonna Take That Mountain”,  “Close To Crazy”), John Anderson (“I Fell In The Water”), Wade Hayes (“How Do You Sleep At Night”) , Chris Stapleton (“Outlaw State Of Mind” on the Grammy award winning quadruple-platinum album Traveller), Toby Keith, Sara Evans, Patty Loveless, Joe Nichols, Darryl Worley, Travis Tritt, Tracy Lawrence, Neal McCoy, Mark Chesnutt and many, many more.  Internationally, he has penned no less than nine #1 Country hits in Australia.

As part of a trio with friends Larry Cordle and Carl Jackson, Jerry recorded the song “You’re Running Wild” on the Louvin Brothers Tribute on Universal South Records. Entitled Livin’, Lovin’, Losin’ – Songs of the Louvin Brothers, the album features numerous country music stars singing songs made famous by the legendary duo. The project won the 2003 GRAMMY for Country Album of the Year.

In the bluegrass genre, Jerry was named the 2018 and 2019 IBMA Songwriter of the Year and has had hundreds of songs, including numerous chart-toppers, recorded.  He was thrilled to have co-written three songs on The SteelDrivers GRAMMY award winning album, The Muscle Shoals Recordings (“A Long Way Down”, “The River Runs Red”, “6 Feet Away”), and a song on the Del McCoury Band GRAMMY winning album The Streets of Baltimore (“The Butler Brothers”).  Other bluegrass groups who have recorded Jerry’s songs include The Osborne Brothers, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Rhonda Vincent, Lonesome River Band, Balsam Range, Seldom Scene, Flatt Lonesome, IIIrd Tyme Out, Larry Stevenson, Donna Ulisse, Dave Adkins and many others.  Salley is a multiple IBMA Song of the Year nominee, and his song “All Dressed Up”, recorded by Joe Mullin and The Radio Ramblers, won the IBMA Gospel Recorded Song Of The Year award in 2016.  Jerry is an eight-time IBMA Award winner, which includes receiving the 2006 IBMA Album of the Year award for his contribution (as an artist) to the Celebration Of Life album. 

Jeremy Garrett has been playing music since he first picked up the fiddle at the age of three, encouraged by his father, a guitarist steeped in Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys and its guitar/banjo duo of Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs. The two formed a band together, the Grasshoppers, and that helped launch Jeremy’s 45-year – and counting — career as a musician.

Born in California, Garrett grew up in Idaho, before moving to Nashville in 1998, co-founding the Infamous Stringdusters when a musician friend, dobro player Andy Hall, approached his bandmate in a group named the Ronnie Bowman Committee (along with ex-mandolin player Jesse Cobb) to join forces with his Berklee College of Music classmates, banjo player Chris Pandolfi and former guitarist Chris Eldridge, in the group’s first iteration in 2005. The band’s current lineup includes double-bassist Travis Book, who came aboard in 2005, and guitarist Andy Falco, who replaced Eldridge in 2007. Since that time, the Stringdusters have garnered a Grammy Award in 2018 for Best Bluegrass Album (Laws of Gravity) and two nominations, the most recent in 2022 in the same category (A Tribute to Bill Monroe).

Since that time, Garrett has released seven solo albums, with his latest, Storm Mountain, his first since 2022’s well-received River Wild. Now living “off the grid” in a cabin on 12 acres with his wife and eight-year-old daughter in a remote section of Theodore Roosevelt National Forest outside of Drake, Colorado, Garrett recorded the album in a one-room studio outside of Fort Collins, CO, at the foothills of the mountains, before he added his parts at his own Storm Mountain home studio.

Storm Mountain deals with such serious topics as a fall from grace (“Son of Perdition”), the bitterness of fate (“The Cold Hard Truth”), lost love (“Fly Away”), the meaning of life (“Anchor in the Deep”) and hopes for his daughter (“You’re Gonna Fly”). In addition, there are playful stabs at modern phenomena from social conventions (“Don’t Ask’) to UFOs (“Rosewell”).

“I’m interested in World Music and how the fiddle has been played around the globe,” said Garrett, whose previous albums have explored a wide range of fiddle effects, including loops and pedals, showing the instrument can be as eclectic as the guitar. “It’s been integrated in all forms of music as one of the most versatile instruments on the planet. There’s something about fiddle players that’s unique.”
“I wanted to draw on something a little different than what I do with the ‘Dusters, by touching on my more traditional lineage in gospel, country and blues. These are songs that don’t quite fit in with the crowds we usually play for. When I go back to the band, I’m way better and more fulfilled for having done these solo records.”

At 48 years old, Garrett is relatively young for a bluegrass veteran and looks forward to performing his music live for audiences. “When I write songs now, it’s from the standpoint of someone who’s been through some life experiences over the past 20 years. My goal is for this record to be uplifting at the same time as it’s more reflective in terms of healing."

With the Dusters about to celebrate their 20th anniversary next year with a new album, Garrett looks forward to finding time for the occasional solo performance along with his “day job.”

His ultimate inspiration are guys like Larry Sparks (“Slow Train” on the new album is a tribute to him), Del McCoury and the late Ralph Stanley, who have performed into their 70s, 80s and 90s.

“I want to play this music forever,” said Jeremy. With Storm Mountain, he continues on that path.

Rick Faris is a Kansas Music Hall of Fame Member who was recently awarded the “Songwriter of the Year” at the 2024 International Bluegrass Music Association Awards making him an 8-time IBMA Award winner. In addition, Rick won the coveted “New Artist of the Year” in 2022. Faris also spent 11 years with Special Consensus while the band earned two GRAMMY nominations before embarking on his chart-topping solo career.

The Rick Faris Band is an International touring Bluegrass outfit playing in the US, Mainland Europe, The British Isles and Canada. They bring sibling harmony and comedic relief with brother JimBob Faris on bass and a youthful snap to their original brand of music with a couple of bluegrass thoroughbreds, Henry Burgess (who grew up with fiddle legend Byron Berline) and Gibson Davis (who is a third generation bluegrass musician following father Chris Davis and his Grandfather Danny Davis). Rick recently moved to Owensboro, Kentucky the Bluegrass Music Capital and has opened his Faris Guitar Co. Rick has stayed busy songwriting and recording his 4th solo record with Dark Shadow Recording label (Nashville, TN) that will release July 11th, 2025.

Rick Faris is a Kansas Music Hall of Fame Member who was recently awarded the “Songwriter of the Year” at the 2024 International Bluegrass Music Association Awards making him an 8-time IBMA Award winner. In addition, Rick won the coveted “New Artist of the Year” in 2022. Faris also spent 11 years with Special Consensus while the band earned two GRAMMY nominations before embarking on his chart-topping solo career.

The Rick Faris Band, is an international touring Bluegrass outfit playing in the US, Mainland Europe, The British Isles and Canada. They bring sibling harmony and comedic relief with brother JimBob Faris on bass and a youthful snap to their original brand of music with a couple of bluegrass thoroughbreds, Henry Burgess (who grew up with fiddle legend Byron Berline) and Gibson Davis (who is a third generation bluegrass musician following father Chris Davis and his Grandfather Danny Davis). Rick recently moved to Owensboro, Kentucky the Bluegrass Music Capital and has opened his Faris Guitar Co. Rick has stayed busy songwriting and recording his 4th solo record with Dark Shadow Recording label (Nashville, TN) that will release July 11th, 2025.

There’s something of Missy Raines in every song she records or performs. Whether she wrote it herself or selected it from another songwriter, she’s lived inside the story and the sound. And she wants you to experience it alongside her. 

Love & Trouble, Raines’ latest album with her band Allegheny, offers views from the highest peaks of her native West Virginia and from the deepest hollers of heartbreak. The 10 songs come to life with people, places, and stories that have caught her heart during her five-decade journey in bluegrass and beyond.

“Who I am,” Raines reflects, “is because of what I've been through, what I've seen and experienced, what I've loved, what I've been moved by.”

As a kid, Raines often traveled with her family to festivals in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the beating heart of bluegrass in the 1960s and 70s. She’d dabbled in piano and guitar, but when her father bought a bass for himself when she was 10, she picked it up and never let it go. (The same bass is still her primary instrument now.) She started performing as a young teenager, and since then she’s played with some of the greats across several generations: Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Eddie Adcock, Bobby Osborne, Alison Brown, Bill Evans, Laurie Lewis, and Claire Lynch, to name a few. In her 40s, she took on the mantle of bandleader, cementing her own legacy in the bluegrass world. 

In 1998, she became the first woman to win IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year award, and she’s won that title another nine times since, as well as IBMA awards for collaborative projects with a wide range of her bluegrass peers and a Grammy nomination for her 2018 album, Royal Traveller. Her stature and her sparkle made her a well-received host of the 2024 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards show alongside fellow bassist John Cowan.

Nearly all the songs on Love & Trouble are rooted in some moment along her path, in the people and places and feelings she wants to share with her audience for the kind of connection that lasts.

“Yanceyville Jail” stems from one of Raines’ earliest memories of bluegrass, or at least from the backstory behind it. It was the early 1970s, and she was a kid in the audience at the storied Camp Springs, North Carolina, bluegrass festival. When Jimmy Martin’s set time rolled around, festival promoter Carlton Haney walked onstage and explained that Martin wasn’t going to be performing that evening, though he’d rejoin the festivities the following day. “You’re not going to hear Jimmy sing tonight,” Raines, in a near-perfect mimic of Haney’s North Carolina drawl, recalls him explaining, “because Jimmy’s gonna spend the night in the  Yanceyville jail.” The way she’s heard it, there was a backstage scuffle between Martin and Haney before the set. The ground was muddy and tempers were high, ripe conditions for a juicy bit of bluegrass lore. Decades later, Raines has committed the story to song, told from Martin’s imagined perspective: “I’ve been in hard liquor and soft red clay / And I’ve been in some trouble here today / Roll and tumble tooth and nail / I ain’t going to the Yanceyville jail.”

Celebrating nine seasons on Discovery Channel’s hit series, “Moonshiners”, comedian Killer Beaz is touring the nation, when not filming.  With decades of comedy clubs and theatres, television and radio, Killer Beaz is legendary in the comedy industry.  Beaz continues to make regular stops with his outrageously, funny and clean comedy show to The Grand Ole Opry stage.  Tickets and information for his tour are available at www.KillerBeaz.com.

Killer Beaz has his own, unique brand of “Hard Hitting” – "Laugh out Loud" – “Laugh A Lot” – “HI-PROOF” – “High Energy” – “Everyman-style” comedy!  With many thousands of radio, television and stage appearances, Beaz has been entertaining audiences worldwide, but his passion is his live stage performance. He is an award-winning artist and has been signed with both Sony and Warner Brothers Records, and received reviews such as:

​Beaz is 'Killer!’" - Rolling Stone Magazine

“Killer Beaz lives up to his name, 'Killing' his audience, night after night, show after show!”

- Entertainment Today/Las Vegas, NV

“Killer Beaz has a universal appeal that makes him a crowd favorite!” – SHOWTIME/Reno, NV

​Don’t miss your opportunity to see “THE BEST BUZZ in TOWN!”   See him on television, hear him on the radio, see his stage performance live...you'll be "Stung for Life!"  

On this week's episode, Rick chats with Ray Cardwell! Ray talks about working with music legend Dave Mason, his friend and mentor John Cowan, his new record deal with Americana Vibes, and his great experience working with Jeremy Garrett from The Infamous Stringdusters!

Michael Cleveland Rocks! Do not miss this show! Please take my word for it!

Rick's guest this week is award-winning musician Tim Rabon!