Adam Steffey holds the all-time record with 11 Mandolin Player of the Year awards and five Grammys, yet on November 15, 2018, as the Highland Travelers disbanded, he announced he was leaving music for another profession. By January 2019 he was back, joining Volume Five. This episode works backward from that reversal to understand a musician who did not touch a mandolin until age 15.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1965, Steffey moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1975 and spent his weekends absorbing traditional music at the Carter Family Fold before ever picking up the instrument. We explain the chop that made him the rhythmic engine of Alison Krauss and Union Station on Every Time You Say Goodbye and So Long So Wrong, and the frequency awareness that let him play on records by Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, the Dixie Chicks, Carrie Underwood, and  ...