Hotline Feature – Tony Trischka: Earl Jam, Rediscovered Earl Scruggs Recordings, and Mountain Stage Preview

Legendary banjo player Tony Trischka joins Dave Weekley ahead of his Sunday appearance on Mountain Stage at the Culture Center in Charleston. Trischka details Earl Jam, his project built around more than 200 previously unheard recordings of Earl Scruggs jamming with John Hartford between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s — tapes that arrived on a thumb drive from a friend in Syracuse and revealed a looser, blues-inflected side of Scruggs rarely captured on record. Trischka discusses his personal friendship with Scruggs, including recording a double banjo arrangement of Farewell Blues with him knee to knee in the studio, and recounts a formative late-night jam session with Hartford at the Augusta Heritage Workshop on the campus of Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia. The conversation also touches on collaborators Sierra Ferrell and Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings' extraordinary rise from festival stages to 16,000-seat arenas, and how a Kingston Trio record set Trischka on the path to the banjo at age 14.