This episode of The String is a field report from the city that raised me in the 1970s and 80s and gave me my foundation in music, from college rock radio, to youth orchestra at Duke University, to jazz tutelage at a Black Muslim community center. It’s an arts-forward city that in the past decade has become something of a magnet for roots music, building on a history of gospel, blues and string band music, while the new festival Biscuits & Banjos, curated by Rhiannon Giddens, has put itself in a position to be a bridge from the past to the future and give Durham the identity it’s lacked as a national music hotspot.

Saturday’s WMOT festival gives us a fresh reason to pause and think about the fuzzy quantum energy particle that is Aaron Lee Tasjan. He’s a shapeshifter, a rocker and a folkie, a singer and guitar player for the ages, and a mensch beloved by his Nashville community. In the dozen years he’s been in Nashville, he’s released a wildly daring and diverse string of albums. Among them: the jangling alt-country of In The Blazes, the Glamericana of Silver Tears, two different versions of his Beatles-ish rock and rolling Karma For Cheap, and last year, the delicious and sometimes snarky synth-pop opus Stellar Evolution. A bit of all those moods will work their way into ALT’s set on Saturday for Roots On The Rivers. It was time to catch up with our restless friend.

Texas songwriter Vincent Neil Emerson graduated from playing on the streets and in the bars of Fort Worth to tours with Colter Wall and American Aquarium and then a well-received debut album (2019’s Fried Chicken And Evil Women). That inspired none other than Rodney Crowell and Shooter Jennings in turn to take an interest in producing the young country troubadour, resulting in a self-titled release in 2021 and the more recent The Golden Crystal Kingdom of 2023. They heard what I hear - an artist processing his past and making his struggles universal, a singer with an honest voice and a distinct point of view. He paused during his ongoing touring to sit down with WMOT after a show at Skinny Dennis.