Alison Brown

Born in 1962, Brown spent her early years in Connecticut, where her interest in music began very young in spite of growing up in a relatively non-musical family and certainly not one steeped in Appalachian tradition. "I started playing guitar at age eight," she recalled. "What drew me to music was my parents taking guitar lessons, and what drew them to it was the great folk scare of the early 1970s. They were kind of dabbling in it, people who kind of stumbled on it and were interested in it for a short period of time. They started taking guitar lessons at a studio in North Stamford, where we lived, and showed me a few chords and went off to Europe for a few weeks. They left an older cousin who played guitar in college to take care of us. She showed me a few things, and they said I was good enough to take lessons. So I started taking lessons from a guy who also played bluegrass banjo. And he brought over the Flatt & Scruggs Foggy Mountain Banjo record one day, and once I heard that, it was my goal to take banjo lessons the next summer."

So at age 10, Brown began to play the banjo, which at the time was an even less likely instrument for young New England girls to pick up than it is today. (She's a skilled guitarist as well, but has only rarely played it on albums.) "The sound of the banjo has always really captivated me," she explained, "and still does when I hear those old Scruggs instrumentals. I love all kinds of music, but that's really my first love."