Alison Brown, Ricky Skaggs & Marty Stuart Video performing Bill Monroe’s Heavy Traffic Ahead

For the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s BIG NIGHT (At the Museum), Marty Stuart, Ricky Skaggs, and Alison Brown gather for a “Bluegrass Summit,” performing Bill Monroe’s “Heavy Traffic Ahead” with Lester Flatt’s custom-appointed Martin guitar, Earl Scruggs’s favorite Gibson banjo, and Bill Monroe’s genre-shifting Gibson F-5 mandolin.

Stuart joined Flatt’s band at age thirteen, launching a career that, in 2020, landed him in the Country Music Hall of Fame. He played Lester’s Martin many times in his youth, recognizing it instantly as the one he’d seen Flatt play on the syndicated “Flatt & Scruggs” television show, which helped popularize bluegrass music.

Skaggs first played Monroe’s mandolin at a Kentucky schoolhouse, when Monroe put it around the neck of six-year-old Skaggs, who was gaining a reputation in Bluegrass State coal-mining country for his precocious talents. Skaggs’s ascension to country stardom helped ignite popular re-interest in Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass,” and he and Monroe even starred in music videos together.

Brown broke gender barriers in becoming a masterful female banjo player, following Scruggs’s adventurous, expansive example.
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