Jonathan Byrd

A seventh-generation North Carolinian, a preacher's kid and a Gulf War veteran, Jonathan Byrd writes narrative songs about love, life and death in America and plays them in a range of traditional acoustic styles built on flatpicking.

He won the New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 2003 and outsold the main stage acts there that year. More than a dozen albums and two decades of touring later, his plain, working-class songs have become campfire standards, picked up along the way by players like Sam Bush and Tim O'Brien.

Cackalack, written as a tribute to his family's seven generations in the state, reached number one on the Roots Music Report folk chart in 2011.