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At the end of September, Sammy Shelor could be found relaxing in his ragged tour bus during the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass week. It was a rare moment of calm in a week he calls “bluegrass music overload.”

As fervent bluegrass followers know, Shelor leads the Lonesome River Band, which turned 30 this year. Their calendar is booked with a never-ending highway of clubs, fairs and festivals. And, oh, by the way, on Friday (Nov. 11), he’s performing on the Late Show With David Letterman at the invitation of Steve Martin, a banjo enthusiast.

The low-key banjo player from Meadows of Dan, Va., was shocked to realize that he won — and many would say earned – that trip to New York City.

Martin, his wife, and other members of the banjo elite — if those last two words can be coined — determined Shelor would receive a $50,000 cash prize as a reward for his steadfast career as a banjo player. He is just the second winner of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, and the Letterman gig is part of the package deal.

Of course, as a bluegrass musician, Shelor is used to easygoing conversation with fans. On that sunny September afternoon, he chatted with CMT.com about his bluegrass roots, his legacy with the Lonesome River Band and his ambitious plans for the future.

CMT: How did you discover bluegrass?

Shelor: I was born into it. My grandfather played banjo. He and my other grandfather loved the music, so I think they decided I was going to be a banjo player before I was born because I was exposed to it from the time I was born. I started playing it when I was 5, just fooling around with it as a kid. Then when I was 10, I started playing in some bands.

I had a school teacher that I got in a band with, and he was a huge record collector. He started making me eight-track tapes of all these albums that he had. He exposed me to J.D. Crowe, the Seldom Scene and all these bands from the ’70s, and also the early stuff – Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs. He turned me on to a lot of great music, so I started listening to that and learning from it. It’s hard to learn from an eight-track tape because you had to wait for it to go all the way around to hear the lick again. It wasn’t too long until I got a turntable and started buying albums.

Where I live, there’s so much old-time and bluegrass music. You’re exposed to it constantly. Back then, there were always fiddlers conventions and contests. There was one every weekend somewhere, and my grandfather would take me. He’d walk up with me to a crowd of pickers and say, “Let this boy play.” That’s how I got exposed to a lot of great players.

Is that still the key for up-and-coming musicians — listen to the older records and go to festivals and play?

Absolutely. We do a style of music that is a little bit different than the traditional stuff in the sense of feel. It’s more rock ‘n’ roll-oriented with downbeat, but still we play the melody like the pioneers did. When I kick a song off, I play it like the singer sings it. That way, the people know what the song is if they’ve heard it before. Our goal has always been to introduce younger people to it, so they’ll go back and listen to the pioneers and learn to appreciate that, as well.

The Lonesome River Band turns 30 this year. What kind of emotion does that bring out in you?

That I’m getting old! (laughs) I’ve been in the band 21 years. The last original member left the band in 1995 — and that was Tim Austin, who started the band in 1981. When I got in this band, it was Ronnie Bowman, Dan Tyminski, Tim Austin and myself. That’s kinda when we discovered our sound and found a personality within the four of us. We were doing something that nobody had ever done before. And it was by accident.

Newgrass Revival was our hero back in those days. That was our rock ‘n’ roll, listening to those guys. We all tried to go for a more contemporary sound through the ’80s. I was in a band called the Virginia Squires, and we did that sort of thing. Then the Lonesome River Band had done that sort of thing up to that point, too.

When we got together, we just made the decision that we were going to cut the most traditional album that we were capable of. Well, that was kind of an oxymoron, I guess, but it ended up being a sound that nobody had ever put out there before.

My guitar player now, Brandon Rickman, was 14 when that record came out. And that was what turned him on to bluegrass. He became a student of that style, and that’s how he was able to step into this job so easily. For 10 years, he had done nothing but pattern his playing and singing to what we were doing.

How did you find out about winning the Steve Martin banjo award?

I went to the post office on the Tuesday after Labor Day — Sept. 6. I’ll remember that for a while. I went to the post office box, and there was a notice for me to sign for something. I saw Steve Martin’s name written on it, and I was like, “Well, I know a few Steve Martins.” So I go up to the counter and the postmaster hands me the envelope. It has “Beverly Hills” written on it and I thought, “Oh! OK.” …

I opened up the overnight package, which was sent out on Sept. 2. It takes a long time to get from Beverly Hills to Meadows of Dan. So I opened the envelope and I see another envelope in there that has the logo: Steve Martin Award for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. It’s got my name written on it. I was standing there and my wife was standing there and the postmaster. I opened it up, and the first thing I see is a check for $50,000. And I don’t know what I said at that point! (laughs) I apologized to the postmistress several times. (laughs)

How does that prize affect your approach to the future?

It’s been a busy time since then. And my whole thing with this is, it’s another stepping stone. The frustrations and everything you go through, it brings it home that it was worth it. I’m here for a reason. Some days I wonder why, and then something like this happens. It’s such a generous and wonderful thing that Steve and his wife would do something like this. And that they’re generous enough to help people in our industry who work really hard.

This is my 35th year on the road. I started out playing clubs when I was 14. I was a big boy for my age, so I could get into clubs without getting questioned. You know, it’s a lot of miles and a lot of time and a lot of eating bologna sandwiches. Now, after all these years, I have a start on retirement, and I’ve never had that before. That was the first thing that went through my mind whenever I got the money: I’ve got to set myself up for retirement.

What does the future hold for the Lonesome River Band?

We feel like what we do can be shared. You know, the jam band thing has gotten so big. Some of the bluegrass-oriented acts in that marketplace got their upbringing on us. A lot of them will tell you that. I get told every day, and it makes me feel great to know that we’ve influenced people. And they’re succeeding with it. It’s just that I’ve got to succeed a little better. (laughs)

We are trying all the different things we can do to build a bigger following. … It’s all about the fans, and we want to keep creating stuff that the fans will get into. We want to keep on touring and hope for the best. And one of these days I’m going to be the old guy, where people say, “Oh, he can still play!”

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Bela Fleck and the Flecktones will bring their wild fusion of Americana, jazz and more to the Belleayre Music Festival on Saturday night. A benefit for those affected by Tropical Storm Irene, Fleck’s show will help bring some solace to those hit hard.

Fleck spoke about Irene and his banjo playing in a Q&A with Timothy Malcolm.

Q&A: Bela Fleck

Q: How’s 2011 been thus far, with the original band back together? 

Fleck: It’s been fantastic – not to be cheesball, but it’s kind of like a homecoming.

Q: What kind of crowds are you seeing on tour? Same as before, or new fans to the sound?

Fleck: Crowds have been up since the last touring we did. There are folks that never heard the original band, but are curious, and some folks that used to come all the time but drifted away are now back. The old friends admit to very sentimental feelings about hearing Howard [Levy’s] harmonica and piano back in the band.

Q: Proceeds of your show at Belleayre are going toward victims of Tropical Storm Irene’s impact this weekend in the Catskills. As your life has been heavily based in the northeast, what’s your response to the storm?

Fleck:It’s pretty hard to believe, and very upsetting, and the weather has changed so much in recent years, we probably should be prepared for anything now. Living in Nashville as we do, we know about flooding – which hit us hard last year. My house was damaged in the Nashville flood, but I was lucky overall.

Our show in NYC on sunday was cancelled due to the hurricane too. Crazy times, my heart goes out to everyone who has suffered so much!

Q: On that note, do you believe in any kind of healing power provided by the banjo? That may sound trite, but as an instrument that can be both melancholy and joyous, do you feel there is a connection to the soul?

Fleck: Music itself can have a powerful healing effect, if it is coming from the right place, with the right spirit. I know our music can really uplift people, and I hope it can serve that purpose here.

Q:  “Rocket Science,” which is fantastic. It’s freewheeling but has multiple layers – the sound of four accomplished players bringing a lot to the table, and everything fitting well. Did the process work as well as the result? Was it very back and forth creating the songs?

Fleck:  Thank you! Everyone contributed in huge ways, and we all feel that it represents who we are today as a group and as individuals. Several of the tunes were co-writes with me and Howard and Victor, and many of them were pieces I had written and saved up for the right time.

Q: How assured do you feel is the Flecktone sound right now? Do you feel it’s trademark – like, you can hear the sound down the street and know, “That’s the Flecktones”?

Fleck:I think we’d be hard to mistake for anyone else – especially with the harmonica back in the group. So yes!

Q: Where do you feel reverence for the banjo currently stands in the music world?

Fleck: I don’t think most people think of banjo with reverence, but it is more respected than it has been in some other periods.

Q: And on that note, do you feel there’s enough musical experimentation going around?

Fleck:Experimentation is a great thing when it serves the artistic goals of the music and brings out though provoking or emotionally satisfying elements. We love experimenting, in the service of a song or a mood. But there is a lot of great music that is not based in experimentation. There is probably the right amount of experimentation going on.

• Link to audio/video - http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139880625/the-banjos-roots-reconsidered?sc=tw&cc=twmp

Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He’s holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it.

Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta plays the akonting, an African instrument that may be a precursor to the banjo.

Jatta’s father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn’t think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students.

“When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music,” Jatta says. “I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father’s akonting.”

That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo’s connections with the instrument he grew up with.

The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they’re just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region.

Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion.

“Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region,” he says, “the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned.”

For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument’s gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head.

But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting’s short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style.

“What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style,” Jatta says. “This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old.”

That early style of playing predates the three-finger style used today by nearly all bluegrass banjo players. Something similar is still used by folk and country musicians who play in a style sometimes called frailing or clawhammer.

After doing 10 years of research supported by a Swedish university, in 2000, Jatta presented his findings first in Stockholm, and then a few months later at a banjo collectors’ convention in Boston. Greg Adams is a banjoist and graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland; he says Jatta’s findings on the akonting have forced many scholars to rethink their assumptions about where to look for information on the banjo’s ancestors.

“A lot of the emphasis up to that point was focused on griot traditions, which is extremely important as part of the conversation as we look to West Africa,” Adams says. “But what the akonting did was open up a new line of discourse.”

The ngoni and xalam are instruments typically played by griots — praise singers who enjoy special status in many West African tribes. Adams says the akonting is a folk instrument, played not by griots, but by ordinary people in the Jola tribe.

In terms of which tradition has the most direct connection to the banjo, Adams says it’s a mistake to think of it as an either/or proposition: “Each of these traditions deserves to be explored, experienced, examined on their own terms.”

Jatta plans to continue his work, documenting the akonting musical tradition and its connections to the banjo and other areas of Jola culture, through a research and education center he’s founding back home in Gambia.