Billy Strings Takes Entertainer of the Year Again as the IBMA Awards Make Room for a Wider Tent

Billy Strings was named Entertainer of the Year at the 37th International Bluegrass Music Association awards, held this week at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was his fifth time taking the honor in six years, a run that has shifted from surprise to expectation.

His acceptance was short and personal. He thanked his wife and son for making the touring possible, and the musicians in the room who shaped him. Days earlier, he had performed at the Country Music Hall of Fame induction in honor of the Stanley Brothers.

The rest of the evening told a second story. Sierra Hull took Mandolin Player of the Year for the eighth time, and Kristin Scott Benson matched that count on banjo. East Nash Grass, a band that began as a weekly gathering at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge outside Nashville, won Instrumental Group of the Year and Album of the Year for All God’s Children. The Grascals won Collaborative Recording of the Year for “Broken Angels,” recorded with Dolly Parton, and performed it during the night’s tributes to figures the genre lost this year.

Banjoist and broadcaster Joe Mullins framed the moment plainly. The visibility of Strings and Alison Krauss’s return to touring, he said, is a tide that rises all ships, and bluegrass has something people are looking for now: music that is organic and authentic in the age of AI.

Singer-songwriter Lindsay Lou, whose album Bluegrass Women addresses the same question, described the shift in representation as slow but real. The awards stage now accommodates both the progressive and the neo-traditional camps without treating them as opponents. What remains to be seen is whether that breadth holds when the spotlight moves on.