Susto frontman Justin Osborne did not record bluegrass versions of his previously released indie-rock songs as a play to book more festival dates. But it didn’t hurt. After moving to Asheville, N.C., and becoming inspired by the genre’s rich roots there, the rechristened Susto Stringband’s 2025 album with the local Holler Choir, Volume 1, opened up a lot of opportunities, Osborne says. “We started to get offers to play these string band- and bluegrass-oriented festivals that Susto never had a position in.”
Osborne is benefiting from a pivotal moment in bluegrass history. Thanks to arena-filling phenomenon Billy Strings and rising mainstream country stars Zach Top and Molly Tuttle, the genre is “going through an upward cycle,” says Ken White, executive director of the Nashville-based International Bluegrass Music Association.
“For a long time, artists did not want to get pigeonholed into bluegrass,” adds Craig Ferguson, president of Planet Bluegrass, whose long-running events include the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and RockyGrass. “Now a lot of artists are wanting to do their bluegrass thing, from Dierks Bentley to Sturgill Simpson.”
Invented by Bill Monroe in the 1930s, the soulful melding of high, lonesome harmonies; acoustic string instruments; and onstage picking circles has periodically pushed past its comfort zone at campfires and hullabaloos. Elvis Presley turned Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” into a foundational rock ‘n’ roll anthem in 1954; hippie inheritors like New Grass Revival, including Bela Fleck and Sam Bush, gave it new life in the ’70s, as did Leftover Salmon and String Cheese Incident with their Grateful Dead-style jam-band approach in the ’90s. Alison Krauss boosted the music even further throughout the same decade, contributing with other bluegrass stars on 2000’s out-of-nowhere smash O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. “It happens every decade or so,” White says.
Strings, 32, currently dominates the genre. In October, his Highway Prayers topped Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums and Top Album Sales charts. According to Luminate, he had the most consumed bluegrass albums in 2023 (Me / And / Dad, 11.1 million streams and 49,000 sales) and 2024 (Highway Prayers and Live, Vol. 1, with a combined 37.9 million streams and 64,000 sales). His stardom has led to collaborations with Post Malone and Luke Combs; on his 2023 tour, he grossed $10.8 million and sold 174,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore. In late February and early March, Strings sold out two Bridgestone Arena concerts in Nashville, then followed up with a sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium.
Ferguson suspects that evolving sound technology is a factor in Strings’ rise to fame. He says that since the Telluride festival’s debut in the late 1980s, it has struggled to balance the musicians’ need to hear one another onstage with the need to amplify the music throughout the venue. Strings and his fellow players benefit from using in-ear monitors, which leads Ferguson to say, “I’m not sure Billy could do his thing without that technological shift.”
Strings is the highest-profile success in a genre that has spent the last decade growing from niche to mainstream. Sturgill Simpson spent 2020 releasing bluegrass versions of his older songs on Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions) and Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions); a Tuttle version of Jefferson Airplane‘s “White Rabbit,” with her band Golden Highway, has 2.9 million YouTube views; Greensky Bluegrass and Yonder Mountain String Band regularly headline Denver’s 9,000-seat Red Rocks Amphitheatre; and Dierks Bentley fronts a bluegrass band and put out a live bluegrass EP in 2021, based on his set from the bluegrass festival in Telluride, where he has a vacation home and is frequently seen in the festival crowd.
“It’s exciting to see bluegrass musicians filling arenas in a way they haven’t before,” says Kevin Spellman, Tuttle’s manager of Tuttle, who performed “American Girl” in a Tom Petty tribute at the Country Music Awards last November, along with Bentley and rising bluegrass stars Sierra Hull and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes. “The business goes in waves. There has always been that traditional business, for people like Bela Fleck, Del McCoury and Alison Krauss. But you never have seen it at the ACMs and the CMAs.”
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The massive stages for today’s bluegrass might be enough to make Monroe, who died in 1996, roll over in his grave. Or maybe not. Tim O’Brien, a veteran bluegrass singer and mandolinist, says he’s suddenly getting interest from younger stars who want to collaborate on songwriting — like singer-songwriter Solon Holt, who signed with Universal Music Publishing Group last year. “I’m kind of like Bill Monroe with Elvis Presley,” he says with a laugh. “I’m going, ‘Hey, if I can help him out, and he’s going to sing my song and make it a million-seller, I’ll be happy about that.’”
O’Brien recently performed with Strings at the Bridgestone Arena, along with Greensky Bluegrass dobro player Anders Beck. “Who would have thought 20,000 people would be into the Osborne Brothers’ [1966] song ‘Big Spike Hammer’?” adds O’Brien, whose duet album with his wife Jan Fabricius, Paper Flowers, comes out in early June,
Strings has a “big light show” and the on-stage musicians have “a lot of processing on their instruments to make them sound like you’re sitting right next to them,” O’Brien says.
Strings’ rise to arena stardom has lifted all bluegrass artists, whether they are immersed in the genre, like Tuttle or Hull, or whether they take creative detours into it, like Susto String Band or veteran R&B singer and producer Swamp Dogg, whose album Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St came out last year. “I’m actually singing the same as I always sung, and basically singing the same shit — but that particular group of people has picked up on me very quickly,” the singer says. “I am booked from March through to December. What’s different is I’ve never been booked like that as, say, an R&B singer.”
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Bluegrass artists tend to make the bulk of their revenue through live performances. Brandon Mauldin, manager of The SteelDrivers — a 20-year-old bluegrass band that Chris Stapleton fronted early on — says the act derives 85% of its income from touring, 10% from merchandise and 5% from royalties. The group’s reputation allows it to make a living on fewer than 100 dates per year. “They’ve learned to tour selectively and push in those markets they feel like they can grow,” Mauldin says.
Hull signed to Rounder Records in the early 2000s when she was 13 but released her latest album, A Tip Toe High Wire, independently, purchasing the albums directly from a vinyl manufacturer to avoid paying “an upcharge to the label.” She markets her music to her 151,000 Instagram followers and makes much of her revenue from live dates, including opening for Strings, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. “There’s been a big expansion of the bluegrass umbrella,” Hull says.
Strings also started at Rounder but signed with Reprise after the label’s executive vp/A&R, Jeff Sosnow, says he spent a year “courting him.” Sosnow compares Strings to another Reprise artist — Neil Young — in the sense that Strings may wind up transcending bluegrass. “You never know what Neil’s going to show up with, right?” he says. “I view Billy in that lens.”
Strings’ manager, Bill Orner, has a more succinct explanation for his client’s rise. “We’re just trying to take the Willie Nelson attitude and don’t be an asshole,” Orner says. “Try to do good things with good people and make people happy.”
A version of this story appears in the May 17, 2025, issue of Billboard.
