Abigail Washburn was Colorado College’s first East Asian studies major, spent summers in intensive Mandarin immersion programs in Vermont, first visited China in 1996, and planned a career in international law. Then a five-day silent meditation retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, taken during a road trip before her planned move to China, dissolved that plan and left her with a sudden drive to pursue music. This episode explains how she arrived in Nashville with a clawhammer banjo, toured for five years with the all-female old-time band Uncle Earl, and won second place at the 2004 MerleFest songwriting contest with Rockabye Dixie, which led to her debut solo album Song of the Traveling Daughter, produced by Bela Fleck.

We follow her return to China in 2005 with the Sparrow Quartet, the U.S. government’s 2006 request that they tour Tibet as the first American band to do so, performances in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, and the Silk Road tour that took her from Hohhot to Urumqi collaborating with Uyghur, Tibetan, Han, and Mongolian musicians. The conversation also covers her volunteer work after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the resulting Afterquake EP with Dave Liang, the theatrical production Post-American Girl, the trio the Wu Force with guzheng player Wu Fei, and her Grammy-winning duo album with husband Bela Fleck.

• How clawhammer banjo differs mechanically from three-finger Scruggs style and why it pairs so well with the Chinese guzheng
• The story of teaching folk music at Sichuan University in 2008 and being told she was doing it wrong for lacking hand gestures
• Why Uncle Earl’s 2007 album Waterloo, TN was produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones
• Her recognition as a TED Fellow in 2012 and Vanderbilt University’s first U.S.-China Center Fellow in 2013
• How the birth of her sons in 2013 and 2018 led to a stripped-down two-banjo duo that topped the Billboard bluegrass chart