In 2007 five musicians from Haywood County, North Carolina named their new band after the Great Balsam Range, then dropped the word Great before their first gig because it sounded pretentious. This episode traces how that grounded instinct carried Balsam Range from a casual local jam to IBMA Album of the Year and multi-genre Billboard success without ever leaving home.

The original lineup was anything but amateur: banjo player Marc Pruett had played on Grammy-winning Ricky Skaggs records, guitarist Caleb Smith builds custom instruments as a luthier, and Tim Surrett had toured with the Kingsmen Quartet. Their 2007 debut Marching Home featured guests like Tony Rice and Joe Diffie, Last Train to Kitty Hawk gave them a first number one, and 2012’s Papertown, named for the paper-mill town of Canton in their own county, spent five months atop the National Bluegrass Survey chart. Later came the collaboration Daylight with John Driskell Hopkins of Zac Brown Band, orchestral recordings with the Atlanta Pops, the 2019 crossover album Aeonic, and lineup changes that brought in mandolin virtuoso Alan Bibey.

• Why a song about a working-class paper mill resonates with listeners who have never seen one
• How banjo and orchestral strings occupy different sonic space instead of canceling each other out
• The Art of Music Festival at Lake Junaluska and its roughly 400,000 dollars a year in local economic impact
• What it means when a band becomes civic infrastructure for its hometown
• Surviving the departures of founding members Darren Nicholson and Buddy Melton