Name-checked in Le Tigre's punk anthem Hot Topic, Alice Gerrard is a bluegrass and old-time legend who was born in Seattle in 1934 to a mother from Yakima and a father from Wigan, England, with no inherited Appalachian tradition at all. This episode draws on her 2025 autobiography Custom Made Woman, reviews of her Folkways records, and a 2026 CBS News retrospective to trace how she discovered folk music at Antioch College, moved into the thriving migrant bluegrass scene of Washington, D.C., and leaned on that community after her husband Jeremy Foster was killed in a 1964 car accident, leaving her a widow with four children.

We dig into her partnership with Hazel Dickens, the 1965 Folkways album Who's That Knocking and the 1973 Rounder release Hazel and Alice, and how the two women stepped up to the single center microphone on stages that ha ...