High Notes in the Heat: Molly Tuttle, Golden Highway, and Jerry Douglas Bring Crooked Tree to Life at DelFest

There are sessions, and then there are moments. The kind that remind you why live music still matters, why bluegrass endures, and why certain combinations of musicians feel less like a performance and more like a conversation that's been waiting years to happen. On a sweltering afternoon in Cumberland, Maryland, at the Paste Studio on the Road pop-up tucked inside the grounds of DelFest, Molly Tuttle and her band Golden Highway ?" joined by the legendary Jerry Douglas ?" delivered exactly that kind of moment. Three songs, one small room, and enough musical firepower to light up the entire Appalachian ridge.

The session served as the closing chapter of Paste Magazine's DelFest coverage, a run of live performances that had opened with Del McCoury himself. That the series ended with Tuttle, Douglas, and the full Golden Highway lineup felt not just appropriate but inevitable ?" a perfect bookend to a weekend steeped in tradition and forward momentum in equal measure.

A Room That Could Barely Contain It

The Paste Studio setup at DelFest was, by the host's own cheerful admission, a "sweaty little box" ?" a tiny, extremely hot room that somehow made the performances feel more intimate and urgent rather than less. There's something about close quarters that strips away pretense. When Tuttle and her bandmates settled in, there was no distance between artist and audience, no buffer between the music and the moment. What you heard was what you got: raw, warm, and alive.

Golden Highway arrived at full strength. Dominic Leslie brought his nimble precision to mandolin, Shelby Means anchored the low end on bass, and Bronwyn Keith-Hines wove her fiddle lines through the arrangements with the kind of instinctive grace that only comes from deep familiarity with the material. And then there was Jerry Douglas, seated with his resonator guitar, whose very presence in a room tends to quietly shift the gravitational center of everything around him.

The Record That Wasn't Planned ?" Until It Was

All three songs performed during the session came from Crooked Tree, Tuttle's critically acclaimed album that had recently arrived to widespread enthusiasm across the Americana and bluegrass worlds. The record's origin story is one of those happy accidents that sounds almost too good to be true ?" except that the music itself confirms every word of it.

"I had all these songs I was writing last spring and finally realized I had pretty much enough to make a bluegrass album," Tuttle explained. "I wasn't really setting out planning like, I'm going to make a bluegrass album this year ?" but the songs just started flowing."

What followed was a phone call to Jerry Douglas and a summer spent at his home studio, at a time when the touring world was still finding its footing again and schedules had the rare luxury of flexibility. The timing aligned. The chemistry, as it turned out, had been there all along.

"We worked together a little bit throughout the years since I moved to Nashville, and I knew it would be so much fun," Tuttle said, smiling.

It's worth noting that the Paste host initially introduced the album as solely Jerry Douglas's production ?" a slip quickly and graciously corrected. Crooked Tree was a co-production, a genuine collaboration between two artists who came to the project as equals, each bringing their own instincts and ideas to the table.

On Production: Throwing the Right Party

When the conversation turned to what co-producing a record together actually looks like, Douglas offered what might be the most disarmingly honest description of the producer's role you're likely to hear anywhere in Nashville.

"Producing is like throwing a great big party ?" finding the right people, and then keeping the drinks full," he said. "Hire the right people, show them what you want them to do, and turn them loose."

It's a philosophy that sounds deceptively simple but requires an enormous amount of taste and trust to execute well. You have to know who belongs in the room. You have to know when to guide and when to step back. And you have to create an atmosphere where people feel free enough to take risks. By all evidence ?" sonic and anecdotal ?" that's precisely what happened during the making of Crooked Tree.

The Paste host, to his credit, recognized the parallel immediately: that the studio session philosophy Douglas described wasn't all that different from what Paste tries to do with its own on-the-road performances. Invite the right people, keep the energy up, and see what emerges. On this afternoon in Cumberland, what emerged was something genuinely special.

A Constellation of Collaborators

Part of what makes Crooked Tree such a landmark release in contemporary bluegrass is the extraordinary roster of guests that Tuttle and Douglas assembled around the project. The album reads like a who's-who of the genre's most vital voices, along with a few artists who bridge the gap between bluegrass and the broader Americana universe.

Sierra Hull, who had performed earlier that same day on another DelFest stage, appears on one of the record's tracks. Billy Strings ?" himself one of the defining voices of the new bluegrass generation ?" contributed to the project, as did Old Crow Medicine Show, Margot Price, Gillian Welch, and Dan Tyminski. The list is staggering in its depth and breadth, a testament to the esteem in which both Tuttle and Douglas are held across the musical community.

Tuttle described the process of assembling that cast with characteristic modesty, framing it as simply calling up friends. Douglas, characteristically, couldn't resist adding a punchline ?" noting with mock-wounded pride that they "couldn't find anybody that wanted to do it," prompting knowing laughter from everyone in the room. The joke landed because the opposite was so obviously true: people showed up for this record because they wanted to be part of something worth being part of.

"I said, 'What time should I be there?'" Douglas quipped, playing along with the bit before the room dissolved into laughter.

The Songs Themselves

The session opened with a song that traces the electric, unsettling terrain of love pushed past its limits ?" a narrative of longing and emotional volatility rendered in Tuttle's signature blend of crystalline vocals and bluegrass-rooted instrumentation. The band locked in immediately, Douglas's resonator adding a moaning, aching quality to the arrangement that felt perfectly calibrated to the song's emotional stakes.

The second performance took a sharp turn into storytelling territory, drawing on the rich tradition of rural Southern narrative songwriting. The song centered on a character ?" a farmer with deep Carolina roots and a complicated relationship with law and land ?" whose carefully cultivated secret life plays out against a backdrop of moonlight, hidden crops, and family legacy. It's the kind of character study that Americana music does better than almost any other genre, grounding the universal in the hyper-specific and finding the humanity in the in-between spaces. The band played it with a looseness and joy that suggested this was a song they genuinely loved performing.

The session closed with the album's title track, "Crooked Tree" ?" and before the band launched into it, Douglas offered a small gift to the audience. During the album's recording sessions, he had been noodling on his resonator between takes, playing idly and beautifully, unaware that the tape was still rolling. The spontaneous interlude was eventually trimmed from the final record, but in that DelFest studio, he played it again ?" a rare glimpse at the cutting-room floor, a fragment of the album's making brought briefly back to life.

The song itself is a meditation on difference and self-acceptance, built around the extended metaphor of a tree that grows crooked rather than straight. It's a piece about taking the road less traveled, about resisting the pressure to conform, and about finding strength in the very qualities that make you stand apart. Delivered in that sweltering room, with the full band in harmony and Douglas's resonator humming beneath it all, it felt less like a performance of a song and more like the statement of a philosophy ?" Tuttle's own, offered openly and without apology.

Why This Matters

Bluegrass has always been a music of community. Its history is built on front-porch gatherings and festival fields, on the passing of knowledge between generations and the willingness of established voices to make room for new ones. What Molly Tuttle and Jerry Douglas did together ?" on Crooked Tree and again in that tiny, overheated Paste Studio room ?" exists squarely within that tradition, even as it pushes gently and confidently against its edges.

Tuttle is one of the most gifted musicians working in American roots music today, a guitarist and vocalist of rare fluency who wears her influences lightly and her originality naturally. Douglas has spent decades defining what the resonator guitar can do in a bluegrass context, earning his place as one of the genre's essential architects. Together, they made a record that sounds like it could only have happened when it did, with the people it involved ?" and then they walked into a small room at DelFest and proved, once again, that the music is very much alive on the other side of the studio door.

"It's always a complete pleasure," the host told Tuttle as the session wrapped. "We'll take every opportunity ?" whenever it makes sense for you, we'll be around."

She smiled, thanked the room, and disappeared back into the DelFest afternoon ?" back into the festival that, for one sweaty, luminous stretch of time, had served as the backdrop for something worth remembering. Crooked Tree is available now. Hear it loud.