At the now defunct Medicine Stone music festival in Tahlequah, OK, pre-teen Blaine Bailey stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowd, listening to Turnpike Troubadours. It was his first concert, and he fell in love. He loved the sound, the feeling, the songwriting, the connection, and decided right then and there that he wanted to be up there on that stage someday, making the music the crowd sang along to.

Early in 2021, singer-songwriter Jade (Celeste) Brodie was on her way to a safety certification as a Union Pacific railroad conductor, when she blew past the highway exit and kept on driving. This new job would require Brodie to live mostly out of her truck, sell and board her animals. She was on her way to certify to use the oxygen masks railroad crews sometimes need going through the giant tunnel under Donner Pass (“the big hole”). After being furloughed from the railroad earlier that year, Brodie had been working on a ranch outside of Winnemucca, NV; still, when the call came, she assumed she had to return to the railroad, up until the moment she was supposed to take that freeway exit. Brodie called her boss and told him she wouldn’t be coming back.

On the back of singer/songwriter John Moreland’s shaved-bald head is inked the words “Hell Bound,” in a sailor tattoo-style ribbon. Above it, another tattoo depicts Jesus, complete with a crown of barbed wire ringing Moreland’s forehead. Though incongruous, together the two images convey the tension Moreland still feels after falling out of his Christian upbringing, as well as the on-going, soul-deep tumult that makes his music resonate deeply with so many audiences.

For years, Johnson was one of the best-kept secrets in the local Seattle Americana music scene, enjoying a cult following elsewhere, but no broad national recognition. He worked at Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood staple Al’s Tavern, and played out occasionally. But after “Faraway Skies,” his first single (and still most popular song), that started change:

Borrowing from many and beholden to none, Johnny Mullenax plays a raucous musical smorgasbord he calls “funky country bluegrass.” Though it’s rare for an Americana/country band lead singer also to play lead electric guitar, for the Tulsa, Oklahoma native, splicing lightning-fast solos in between lyric lines appears to be second nature. Mullenax is singularly unconcerned with meeting the expectations of any one descriptor precisely.

“He's a poet and he's a picker, he's a prophet and he's a pusher / He's a pilgrim and a preacher… partly truth and partly fiction,” sings Kris Kristofferson in his seminal song, “Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” inspired by famous wanderers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Johnny Cash.

On Sundays after church when country singer/songwriter Hannah Juanita was a child, her family congregated at her grandparents’ house. There was food and football. And in the background, her grandfather on the couch picking his Gibson Hummingbird guitar (100^th anniversary edition). The gospel and bluegrass music he played was so much a part of the fabric of her childhood, it’s hard to distinguish any one song.