Welcome back. Glad you're here.

I came into this week without a story, so I went back to the row of markers on Broad Street I sent you to last week and read the one next door. The back of it mentions a Saturday jam at a guitar shop on Market Street, and that jam turned out to supply three of the players in Alison Krauss and Union Station. This one's about that room.

In today's post:

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If you ask where bluegrass lives in this corner of Tennessee, people usually point you somewhere else. Bristol has the Birthplace of Country Music. Johnson City has the ETSU program. Hiltons has the Carter Fold. In most versions of that conversation, Kingsport is where you stop for gas on the way.

In 1990, Alison Krauss hired three new players for her band, Union Station. All three were from Kingsport.

All three came out of the same guitar shop on Market Street.

Start with the teacher. James Alan Shelton was born in Kingsport in 1960 and raised just over the line in Gate City. At twelve he saw Ralph Stanley play and wanted in. His father bought him a guitar for $89.95, and James paid it back working for his father at $1.25 an hour. He grew into one of the most distinctive pickers in the region, blending George Shuffler's crosspicking with Doc Watson's flatpicking and a little blues. Later he spent twenty years as Ralph Stanley's guitar player in the Clinch Mountain Boys.

Before all that, he taught lessons at the Guitar Shop in Kingsport.

So did Tim Stafford. Stafford was born and raised here. He found bluegrass in the mid-seventies as a freshman at Ketron High and switched from drums to banjo. He got serious about guitar at eighteen and ended up teaching at the shop too. That's where he gave a kid named Adam Steffey his first mandolin lesson. By Stafford's own account, it didn't take. Steffey found another teacher, got serious, and the next time Stafford heard him play, he couldn't believe it was the same kid.

Steffey wasn't from here originally. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and his family moved to Kingsport in 1975 when his father retired. His grandfather started taking him to Saturday night shows at the Carter Fold, and the sound that caught him was the mandolin.

Then there was Barry Bales. Born in Kingsport in 1969, raised in Colonial Heights, Sullivan South. His father worked at Eastman and played music after supper, and the house was stocked with Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and Stanley Brothers records. Barry took lessons from James Alan Shelton, tried banjo and guitar, and settled on the bass. On Saturday mornings he was at the shop on Market Street for the jam.

None of them was famous yet. Two of them taught lessons, two of them took lessons, and on Saturdays there was a jam.

ETSU's Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music program, still young then, pulled them closer. Bales enrolled in the fall of 1987 as an engineering technology major and signed up for the bluegrass program early. Stafford and Steffey came through it too. Coursework lost.

The three of them played together first in a Kingsport band called The Boys in the Band, then as Dusty Miller, with fiddler Tammy Rogers and Brian Fesler. They worked the festival circuit and kept jamming with a teenage fiddle player from Illinois.

She offered the job to all three at the same time. They took it.

The record they made together, Every Time You Say Goodbye, came out on Rounder in 1992 and won a Grammy. Stafford had left the band by then to be home with his newborn son. The Grammy found him anyway.

Put the title track on while you read the rest.

What came after is worth adding up.

Stafford founded Blue Highway, one of the most decorated bands in the genre, and became one of its most recorded writers. Other artists have recorded more than 300 of his songs, and the IBMA named him Songwriter of the Year in 2014 and again in 2017.

Steffey stayed with Union Station until 1998, then played with the Isaacs, Mountain Heart, Dan Tyminski's band, and the Boxcars. The IBMA has named him Mandolin Player of the Year eleven times. Nobody has more.

Bales never left. He is the longest-serving member of Union Station. He was one of the Soggy Bottom Boys in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and played on four songs from a soundtrack that sold more than eight million copies. He co-wrote "Nobody to Blame" with Chris Stapleton and Ronnie Bowman, and it won the ACM Song of the Year in 2016. His marker counts 15 Grammys and 23 IBMA awards. These days he and his wife raise pastured animals on a farm in Mosheim.

James Alan Shelton recorded ten albums of his own. He died in Kingsport in 2014. He was fifty-three.

And none of that counts Doyle Lawson. He was born in Fordtown in 1944 and led Quicksilver for more than four decades. More than forty musicians passed through that band over the years, and he liked to joke that it worked as a farm team for the rest of bluegrass.

Kingsport doesn't need to borrow anybody's music history. It has its own, and a good share of it walked through one storefront.

Stafford tells the first-lesson story himself, at his own expense, in a 2021 interview with The Bluegrass Situation. It's the best five minutes you'll spend on this.

The Bales marker stands in the median on Broad Street at Center, a short walk from Charles Wright's. Read the back of it next time you're downtown. Lawson's is on Broad too.

Somewhere in this town, a kid has a lesson this week.

That is how it went last time.

A few things worth getting off your couch for:

Sam Bush with Fireside Collective | Tonight, Oct. 2, 6:30 PM | Northeast State Community College, Blountville If this week's story put a mandolin in your head, Sam Bush is the cure. Fireside Collective, Dave Eggar, and the Northeast State Jazz Ensemble are also on the bill. Gates open at 5 with a local food truck, tickets are $40, and the money goes to the college's Workforce Solutions and Entertainment Technology programs. Details

Fall Market, Mercantile Vendor Market | Saturday, Oct. 3, 3:30-8 PM | Kingsport Farmers Market The seventh year of the fall market brings local artisans, makers, and bakers under one roof, with food on site. It's a good early start on the holiday list. Details

Rusty Steel | Saturday, Oct. 3, 8-11 PM | The Reserve Live music downtown for a $5 cover. Come early for dinner and get a table. Details

Beethoven and Beginnings | Sunday, Oct. 4, 3 PM | Kingsport Farmers Market Symphony of the Mountains opens its 80th season with the same Beethoven overture that was on its very first program. After that come Mozart's Clarinet Concerto with principal clarinetist Victor Chavez and Beethoven's Second. Tickets are pay what you can, reserved at mysotm.org. Details

One place up the road doing the work.

Carter Family Fold The Carter Family Memorial Music Center is a nonprofit in Hiltons, Virginia, at the foot of Clinch Mountain. It puts acoustic old-time and bluegrass on its stage on Saturday nights for a family crowd, with no alcohol. It's where Adam Steffey's grandfather took him to hear music and where Johnny Cash played his last live show. Buying a ticket and filling a seat is the most direct way to keep it running. Plan a Saturday night at the Fold

2012 Diana Road, Kingsport, TN | 3 bed, 1 bath

Speaking of Saturday jams.

This one is a brick ranch, all on one level, with a little over 1,200 square feet on more than half an acre. It's move-in ready. The living room has a gas fireplace, the eat-in kitchen and the bathroom have both been updated, the flooring is newer, and there's crown molding. Overhead is a metal roof, which is one less thing to think about for a long time.

Outside, the yard is large, level, and shaded by mature trees. A covered carport and a shed handle whatever doesn't fit in the house, and there's room left over for a garden or a dog or both.

Then there's the back of the lot. The property runs along a creek, and there's a fire pit set up overlooking the water.

Bring a guitar.

See the photos of 2012 Diana Road, then come back and vote.

What do you think they're asking for 2012 Diana Road

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Talk soon,

Ryan