The Earls of Leicester

When the Earls of Leicester formed in 2013, their mission was ambitious but exact: to preserve and promote the legacy of bluegrass legends Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, in hopes of reviving the duo’s music for longtime admirers and introducing a new generation to their genre-defining sound. Within a year of releasing its self-titled debut, the Nashville-based six-piece—bluegrass all-stars Jerry Douglas, Shawn Camp, Jeff White, Charlie Cushman, Johnny Warren, and Barry Bales—had won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and earned six awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association. Despite the band’s painstaking precision in recreating the catalog of Flatt and Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, the music unfolds with an easy warmth that honors the essence of traditional bluegrass, bearing a boundless vitality that makes songs from over a half-century ago feel irresistibly fresh.