In the mid-1930s there was a new kind of music pouring from the radios and juke joints of America. It slowly grew from the tangled roots of African field shouts and the blues, and mingled with the mournful ballads and driving fiddle tunes of white settlers. It picked up a melancholy hope from churches, black and white, along the way.

By 1938, the music had grown a crop of new musical stars — Bill and Charlie Monroe, the Carter Family, the Delmore Brothers, Jimmy Rodgers. In a few more years this river of American string music would split itself off into country and western, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, and honky-tonk. A little later on, a gospel-raised southern boy would record a song by Bill Monroe down in Memphis and change American music forever. But those streams hadn't split off the river yet. They were all there, flowing together.

The Reedy Buzzards formed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1992 to explore the musical moment, sometime back in the 1930s, when Appalachian string-band music, country and western, gospel, and what would later become known as bluegrass, all co-existed in a single stream of acoustic American music. The Reedy Buzzards specialize in the tight harmonies of the great brother-music bands of the past, from the Carter Family to Bill and Charlie Monroe, from the Louvin Brothers to the Everly Brothers.