Missy Raines was born in April 1962 in Short Gap, West Virginia, and was touring professionally on the double bass as a teenager behind pioneers like Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Josh Graves, and Eddie and Martha Adcock. In traditional bluegrass the bass is the engine room, glued to root-and-fifth notes on the downbeat and built to make everyone else look good, but Raines mastered that role so completely that she earned the freedom to ask what else the giant wooden box could do.

This episode follows her progressive turn with Cloud Valley in the early 1980s, the watershed year of 1998 when her self-released album My Place in the Sun landed on the Chicago Tribune's top ten and won IBMA Instrumental Recording of the Year, and her history-making win as the first woman named IBMA Bass Player of the Year, an award she would take ten times. It covers ...