Molly Rose Tuttle was born in January 1993 in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Palo Alto. Diagnosed with alopecia areata at three, which progressed to alopecia universalis and total body hair loss, she found a shield in the guitar at age eight, was on stage by 11 alongside her father, bluegrass instructor Jack Tuttle, recorded the duet album The Old Apple Tree with him at 13, and joined the family band The Tuttles with AJ Lee at 15 with siblings Sullivan and Michael.

This episode follows her from a merit scholarship to Berklee College of Music in 2012, the first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship, and a win at MerleFest’s Chris Austin Songwriting Competition to the all-female Goodbye Girls, who blended bluegrass, jazz, and Swedish folk. After moving to Nashville in 2015, she crowdfunded the 2017 EP Rise and became the first woman ever named IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, repeating in 2018. It then covers the Compass Records albums When You’re Ready and But I’d Rather Be With You, the Golden Highway era on Nonesuch with the Grammy-winning Crooked Tree and City of Gold, a 2023 all-genre Best New Artist nomination, her decision to dissolve Golden Highway at its peak in May 2025, the Jay Joyce-produced So Long Little Miss Sunshine, and her August 2026 marriage to Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show.

• Why learning bluegrass at the Tuttle dinner table was like acquiring a native language
• How Berklee became an x-ray machine for the music of Laurie Lewis, Kathy Kallick, Hazel Dickens, and Alison Krauss rather than a soul-stripping factory
• The mechanics of flatpicking, clawhammer guitar, and cross-picking, three styles she mastered
• Shelby Means, Kyle Tuttle, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and Dominick Leslie, and the 2023 IBMA sweep
• Collaborations with Billy Strings, Bela Fleck, Orville Peck, and Ringo Starr, and the 2026 Grammy nomination for That’s Gonna Leave a Mark