Across the Blue Ridge focuses on the southern Blue Ridge area known through generations and still today as a hotbed of old-time, bluegrass, blues, and country music. And the program reaches far beyond, exploring southern music as the music most people around the world understand as distinctively American. Across the Blue Ridge is smart, irreverent, fun, serious, and entertaining all at once. Host Paul Brown is a former NPR journalist who also happens to be a prize-winning banjo picker, fiddle player, singer, and storyteller.