Many years ago I had the great good fortune to find old-time music, as if something were guiding me to it. People I've chanced to meet, recordings I've either stumbled across, sought out, or been given by generous friends. I have been blessed to meet and learn from elder old-time fiddlers, banjo players, guitar players, and singers over the years, and I've also been inspired by and learned from some amazing old-time musicians of the younger generations.

Old-time music is now found in American families from diverse backgrounds, and while it recalls bygone times and places, it's also very much a living, contemporary music. Most of my friends play and sing it, and I can't think of old-time music without also thinking of those good friends whom I'll meet up with at fiddlers conventions and festivals, or in kitchens and on front porches, going late into the night leaning into long, wild fiddle tunes, and singing tragic old ballads, heart songs, mountain blues.

When my eighteenth-century forebears left Carolina and crossed the Cumberland Gap to settle in the then-verdant country of Old Kentuck, I'm sure they never imagined that musical traditions which their descendants would take pleasure in over generations would go back over the mountain to live and thrive in new fertile ground. But I think that they would be happy at it, and they would surely be honored by it.