In 2007, the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance went to a recording of Whiskey Before Breakfast made in a Colorado hotel room with three vintage Neumann microphones, a laptop, engineer Phil Harris, and Doc Watson sitting across from Bryan Sutton. This episode traces how the Asheville, North Carolina native, born in 1973 to a family of fiddle players and raised in the Pisgah Pickers, learned the microtiming and deep listening of oral tradition before joining gospel group Karen Peck and New River in 1991 and moving to Nashville in 1993.

We cover his 1997 hiring as lead guitarist for Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder during Skaggs’ return to bluegrass, his decision to leave that spotlight for session and touring work with the Dixie Chicks, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, and Tony Rice, his 2002 arrival in Hot Rize, and his role in Chris Thile’s How to Grow a Band, the incubator for the Punch Brothers. The conversation explores the staccato clarity that sets his flatpicking apart, his Bourgeois signature guitars including the Banjo Killer and his 1940 Martin D-28, the Doc Watson tribute Ready for the Times, the solo albums Almost Live, Into My Own, and The More I Learn, and his 2011 online bluegrass guitar school through ArtistWorks.

• What physically separates flatpicking from fingerstyle guitar
• Why a slope-shouldered dreadnought can cut through the frequency of a banjo
• Why a pre-war Martin D-28 is compared to a muscle car that demands precise technique
• How he began singing and songwriting publicly decades into an instrumental career
• His ten IBMA Guitar Player of the Year awards between 2000 and 2016