You could characterize the sounds of Adrienne Young as early Appalachian music fast-forwarded into the twenty-first century. It's contemporary music that has enough humility to reach back to earlier generations for guidance. Bluegrass forms a kind of backdrop for her music, too, but the analogies and labels break down rather quickly. The songs she writes, sings, and plays sound traditional, but with a new twist, the old filtered through the consciousness of the young. Adrienne draws on archaic styles for inspiration, but never merely mimics them.

The Nashville singer, songwriter and claw hammer banjo player certainly comes by her love of old-time, bluegrass, and rural folk music naturally. Her grandfather still plays mandolin in the Timberlane Bluegrass Band, a group best known around Florida (where Adrienne grew up). Her grandmother, Adrienne says, "plays a mean autoharp." Catching the music bug herself, Adrienne graduated from the music-rich Belmont University in Nashville, determined to make songs that rang true both to her roots and to her vision for something new. Her solo record, Plow to the End of the Row, would, as she put it, "focus on music I could jam to with my grandad."

As the winner of a bluegrass song writing contest at Merlefest, Adrienne could not be content with merely repeating what she heard growing up. Soon it became clear that it would require a stretch to find any musical label that would fit. When I asked her to try, she laughed and suggested this label: "heartfelt, postmodern philosophical pop with a folkie, country diddle-do in the middle." She is half-serious, but also acknowledges the difficulty of pigeonholing what she creates.

No wonder a reviewer for the alt-country magazine No Depression gave accolades for her riding "old-time rhythms and lyric ideas right into the middle of modern life's tones and trials." An Entertainment Weekly reviewer tried to find descriptors, too, ending up concluding that she deftly mixes "folkie conscience with bluegrass escapism." Even then, you have to allow that in what she does, the old sounds intermingle with the more contemporary subjects you would expect of a Nashville singer-songwriter making the club circuit, with CDs that occasionally allow an electric guitar or drum kit into the mix.

Read the Full Article in the print issue of Bluegrass Now, or call for a back issue.