Surviving meth hell and defying roots purists, BILLY STRINGS is the rocket-propelled picker blasting bluegrass into the future. Good news for truck-drivers, ’shroomheads, goths, his mum and dad – almost everyone, really. “I don’t want to be playing to just old people knitting,” he assures ANDY FYFE.

Photography by ALYSSE GAFKJEN

THE CITY OF KALAMAZOO MAY SOUND LIKE THE PUNCHLINE TO A SCREWBALL Hollywood Bob Hope caper, but it’s a real place. Plonked equidistant between Chicago and Detroit on the plains of Michigan, ‘Kzoo’ once housed the original Gibson guitar factory – now being developed into a Hard Rock hotel – and has been voted the best little city in America. It’s also a 90-minute drive from the tiny village of Muir, birthplace of Grammy-winning bluegrass upsetter Billy Strings.

At 30, Strings has already reimagined what bluegrass can be, adding elements of metal, bluecollar jam band and even hip-hop – innovations that have raised cries of foul from traditionalists. Not that such criticism bothers Strings.

“I grew up listening to and playing Doc Watson and Bill Monroe,” the tousle-haired picker tells MOJO while we sit in his Kalamazoo hotel, the day before a sold-out as-good-as-homecoming show. “It’s what my father taught me from the age of three. I realise that I’m from Michigan and my parents were tweakers, not miners from Kentucky. Bluegrass is as American as cheeseburgers and Jeffrey Dahmer, but it needs to move on. Am I the guy to do that? Dunno. Maybe.”

BYANY SANE RECKONING, THE MAN BORN WILLIAM LEE APOSTOL PROBABLY SHOULDN’T be alive, let alone be changing the face of bluegrass. His biological father died of a heroin overdose when Billy was two; he smoked his first joint – stolen from his grandfather – when he was eight, and shared his first crack pipe with his mother Debra at just 13. His teen years were a blizzard of drugs – any drugs – drink and truancy, waking up to an endless parade of meth-heads crashed on the family couch after partying for days. And yet somehow he got out from under it.