The 2026 IBMA Songwriter Showcase Lineup, The Paper Kites Acoustic Radio Sessions, Vinyl Summit, 2026 Kerrville New Folk Competition, Live Acoustic Music in South Jersey!
The Acoustic Music World Is Moving Fast Right Now — And This Is Everything You Need to Know
Something is happening in live acoustic music right now, and it is moving faster than most people realize. Across the folk, roots, bluegrass, singer-songwriter, and high-fidelity recording worlds, major announcements are stacking up week after week. Competition lineups are being finalized. Legendary radio programs are delivering performances that will be talked about for years. A forty-year institution is throwing the biggest celebration in its history. And right here in our own backyard across South Jersey, intimate acoustic shows are quietly filling local calendars with exactly the kind of music that matters most.
This is the week’s full Unplugged Live breakdown — everything unfolding across the acoustic music landscape right now, expanded and examined the way it deserves to be.
The 2026 IBMA Songwriter Showcase Lineup Is Officially Set — and It’s a Big Deal for Bluegrass
Every year, the International Bluegrass Music Association puts together one of the most selective and genuinely meaningful songwriter events in the roots music calendar. The IBMA Songwriter Showcase is not a mainstream competition with celebrity judges and social media voting. It is a rigorous, juried event where original bluegrass compositions are submitted, evaluated, and ultimately chosen by people who live and breathe this music professionally — the kind of room where what you write matters far more than how many followers you have.
This year’s showcase will take place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as part of the 2026 World of Bluegrass and the IBMA Business Conference in October. The jury has selected ten original bluegrass songs — each one submitted with a full demo recording, complete lyrics, artist bios, and high-resolution photography — and the twelve songwriters behind them will perform their work live in front of an audience of working artists, record label executives, and music industry professionals.
The ten selected compositions for the 2026 showcase are a genuinely diverse cross-section of what is happening creatively inside the bluegrass world right now. The lineup includes “Can’t Buy Me” by Dakota Rose, “Highway Eleven” by Johnny Williams, “Dark Rolling Deep” by Katelyn Mabry, “How Much He Loved Her” by Mei Lin Heirendt, “Me and Tom Merton” by Sandy Emory Lawrence, “Any I Love You’s” by Tim Williams, “Five Hundred Year Flood” by Adam Pope, “Paperboy” by Ali Vance and John Gray, “I’m a Sure Thing” by Russell Johnson, and “The Man on the Hill” by Jack McKeon and Elliot Russo.
Read that list carefully. These are not household names yet, but that is precisely the point. The IBMA Songwriter Showcase has always operated as a discovery mechanism — a sanctioned, high-stakes platform where previously unknown writers can perform a single, carefully crafted original song in front of people who have the ability to change careers. For the artists selected this year, this October performance in Chattanooga could be genuinely life-altering. For the rest of us watching the bluegrass world from the outside, it is one of the clearest windows we have into where the genre is heading creatively, who the next generation of voices will be, and what stories are being told around this particular musical tradition in 2026.
The depth and craft required to earn one of these twelve spots should not be understated. The submission process is demanding by design, and the juried selection prioritizes artistic integrity over commercial appeal. The result is a showcase that consistently surfaces some of the most compelling original bluegrass writing in the country — and this year’s class of selected songwriters looks no different.
Bluegrass innovator and superstar Billy Strings was named Entertainer of the Year at the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA)’s 36th Annual IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards presented by Get It Played. This is his fourth Entertainer of the Year award; his past wins came in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Revered bluegrass virtuosos Jason Carter and Michael Cleveland’s “Outrun the Rain” picked up two awards, Song of the Year and Collaborative Recording of the Year. The song is from their 2025 Carter & Cleveland album, which won Album of the Year.
The IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards Show, co-hosted by Steve Martin and Alison Brown, was held at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The full list of 2025 IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards recipients:
ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR
Billy Strings
SONG OF THE YEAR
Outrun the Rain - Jason Carter & Michael Cleveland
Songwriters: Terry Herd/Jimmy Yeary
Producers: Jason Carter/Michael Cleveland
Label: Fiddle Man Records
ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Carter & Cleveland - Jason Carter & Michael Cleveland
Producers: Jason Carter/Michael Cleveland
Label: Fiddle Man Records
VOCAL GROUP OF THE YEAR
Authentic Unlimited
INSTRUMENTAL GROUP OF THE YEAR
The Travelin' McCourys
GOSPEL RECORDING OF THE YEAR
He's Gone - Jaelee Roberts
Songwriter: Kelsi Harrigill
Producer: Byron House
Label: Mountain Home Music Company
INSTRUMENTAL RECORDING OF THE YEAR
Ralph's Banjo Special - Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt & Alison Brown
Songwriter: Ralph Stanley
Producer: Alison Brown
Label: Compass Records
NEW ARTIST OF THE YEAR
Red Camel Collective
COLLABORATIVE RECORDING OF THE YEAR
Outrun the Rain - Jason Carter, Michael Cleveland, Jaelee Roberts & Vince Gill
Songwriters: Terry Herd/Jimmy Yeary
Producers: Jason Carter/Michael Cleveland
Label: Fiddle Man Records
MALE VOCALIST OF THE YEAR
Greg Blake
FEMALE VOCALIST OF THE YEAR
Alison Krauss
BANJO PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Kristin Scott Benson
BASS PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Vickie Vaughn
FIDDLE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Maddie Denton
RESOPHONIC GUITAR PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Justin Moses
GUITAR PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Trey Hensley
MANDOLIN PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Sierra Hull
MUSIC VIDEO OF THE YEAR
The Auctioneer - The Kody Norris Show
Songwriters: Leroy Van Dyke/Buddy Black
Producer: James Gilley
Videographer: Nate Wiles
Label: Rebel Records
During the Awards Show, the 2025 inductees into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame were honored: pioneering bluegrass band Hot Rize, The Bluegrass Cardinals, celebrated for its flawless harmonies, virtuoso playing, and original material, and influential African American musician Arnold Shultz, whose influence shaped the development of bluegrass music.
Awards are determined by the professional membership of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), the nonprofit trade organization that connects and empowers bluegrass professionals.
IBMA World of Bluegrass®, in partnership with Chattanooga Tourism Co. and Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, runs September 16-20, 2025. The week, the most important in bluegrass music, encompasses four events: the IBMA Business Conference, Sept. 16-18 at the Chattanooga Convention Center; the IBMA Bluegrass Ramble, an innovative series of showcases taking place Sept. 16-18 in local Chattanooga venues; the 36th Annual IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards, scheduled for Thursday evening, Sept. 18; and IBMA Bluegrass Live!®, Sept. 19-20, a two-day festival of live performances and fan experiences.
The Paper Kites Just Delivered One of the Year’s Most Beautiful Acoustic Radio Sessions
If you missed the most recent episode of Acoustic Café, this past Sunday on Detroit Public Radio WDET 101.9 FM, you need to go back and listen to it on demand right now.
Acoustic Café, the long-running syndicated radio program hosted by Rob Reinhart, has been one of the most important institutions in acoustic and folk music broadcasting for decades. It airs every Sunday afternoon from one to three o’clock Eastern, and it has built its entire identity around one simple but radical idea: give artists a real, unhurried, production-free space to play their music and talk about it honestly. No hype, no forced energy, no promotional packaging. Just music, a room, and a microphone.
This past Sunday’s episode delivered the kind of session that reminds you exactly why the format works so well.
Australian indie-folk five-piece The Paper Kites came to the Leon Loft — the intimate, warmly regarded performance space that has become one of Acoustic Café’s most beloved recurring recording environments — and performed a stripped-back acoustic set drawing from both their catalog and new music. For an American audience that may know The Paper Kites primarily through the delicate, candlelit intimacy of their studio recordings, hearing the full band perform acoustically in a live context is a genuinely different and rewarding experience. Their sound, which has always been built on careful layering and atmospheric restraint, translates beautifully to an unplugged setting. The session captured something rare: a band that genuinely sounds better, not worse, when all the production is removed.
The episode also featured archival in-studio recordings from Detroit’s own Joe Henry, as well as Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Jeffrey Gaines and the legendary Jonathan Edwards, who is approaching his eightieth birthday and still performing with the kind of quiet authority that only comes from a lifetime of honest songwriting. The full playlist for the June 28th broadcast was a masterclass in acoustic programming, weaving together Ani DiFranco’s “Million Dollar Intro,” Feist’s enduring “Mushaboom,” Bedouine’s hushed “Canopies,” Death Cab for Cutie’s “Full of Stars,” Modest Mouse’s “Remember Yourself,” and Allen Toussaint’s “City of New Orleans” into a cohesive listening experience that felt as carefully considered as any concert setlist.
Acoustic Café episodes remain available for on-demand listening for two full weeks after they air. This one is absolutely worth your time.
The Inaugural Vinyl Summit Is Coming to Kansas in October — and It Might Be the Most Significant Audiophile Event in Decades
Here is news that belongs in a larger conversation about what it means to love recorded music at its deepest, most devoted level.
Acoustic Sounds — founded in 1986 by Chad Kassem in Salina, Kansas — has spent four decades building what many consider the single most uncompromising operation in the high-fidelity vinyl world. What started as a one-man mail-order record business has grown into a fully independent analog ecosystem that encompasses mastering, pressing, printing, recording, and distribution, all operating under the kind of obsessive quality standards that have made Kassem a genuinely legendary figure in audiophile circles. The New York Times famously described him as the “wizard of vinyl,” and anyone who has held one of Acoustic Sounds’ audiophile pressings in their hands and put it on a turntable understands exactly what that means.
This October, to mark forty years in business, Acoustic Sounds is hosting its inaugural Vinyl Summit — a four-day, fully immersive gathering in Salina, Kansas, from October 15 through 18, 2026, that is being designed as something far more ambitious than a standard record fair or music festival.
The event is structured to give attendees access to the entire Acoustic Sounds universe at once: behind-the-scenes tours of one of the world’s leading vinyl production and mastering facilities, a large-scale record fair and high-fidelity audio showcase, the opportunity to meet and spend time with some of the most influential figures in the audiophile world — including Daryl Wilson of Wilson Audio and veteran analog journalist Michael Fremer — and, anchoring everything, four nights of live performances from artists whose work defines the roots, blues, and jazz traditions that have always been at the heart of what high-fidelity vinyl was built to preserve.
The performance lineup is extraordinary. Taj Mahal, one of the most irreplaceable figures in American roots and blues music, is headlining. Jimmie Vaughan, the Texas guitar legend and elder statesman of the blues world, will perform. Robert Finley, the late-blooming Louisiana blues artist whose story and voice have captivated audiences since his emergence a decade ago, is on the bill. Chico Freeman, the heavyweight jazz saxophonist with a multi-decade career rooted in forward-thinking improvisation, is scheduled for the Jazz Night opening on October 15th at Blue Heaven Studios — itself a remarkable venue, a beautifully restored 1920s church that Acoustic Sounds has transformed into one of the finest small recording and performance spaces in the country. Dave Douglas, Becca Stevens, and Jerome Sabbaugh are also part of the October 15th lineup, backed by a world-class rhythm section of Pete Washington on bass, Billy Drummond on drums, and Elan Mehler on piano.
The Stiefel Theatre in downtown Salina will serve as the venue for the larger evening performances across the remaining nights, adding a historic and architecturally significant stage to a weekend already full of compelling environments. The combination of record fair, hi-fi showcase, production access, culinary programming — ranging from Cajun food to Kansas-style barbecue — and these live performances creates something that genuinely has never existed before in this form.
For anyone who considers themselves a serious listener — whether that means you own a single turntable or an elaborate high-end system — the Vinyl Summit in October is worth putting on your radar immediately. This is the kind of event that will be talked about long after it concludes.
The 2026 Kerrville New Folk Competition Has Named Its Six Winners
The Kerrville Folk Festival has been one of the most important gathering places in American acoustic and folk music for over fifty years. Held annually in the Texas Hill Country, it functions simultaneously as a festival, a community, and an industry touchstone — the place where the folk world comes together every spring to take stock of itself, celebrate its past, and figure out who its future belongs to.
At the center of that tradition sits the Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk Competition, one of the oldest and most respected emerging artist competitions in the folk and singer-songwriter world. Each year, a national pool of applicants is narrowed down to twenty-four finalists, who perform at the festival. From those twenty-four, six winners are selected — and those six names become part of a lineage that includes some of the most influential acoustic artists of the past several decades.
The 2026 Grassy Hill Kerrville New Folk winners have now been officially named. This year’s six emerging acoustic artists are Hudson Mueller, Stephanie Sammons, Sarah Golden, Helena Hallberg, Catlin Cannon, and Logan Vath. Following the announcement, the winners are currently engaged in a celebratory showcase tour — the kind of post-competition momentum that has historically launched careers and opened doors that no amount of independent grinding can replicate.
For followers of the acoustic and singer-songwriter world, keeping track of the Kerrville New Folk winners each year is one of the most reliable ways to stay ahead of the curve on who is going to matter in this space. This is a competition with a genuine track record of identifying extraordinary songwriting talent before the broader world catches on. The 2026 class is worth watching closely.
Live Acoustic Music in South Jersey: What’s Happening Right Now in Your Own Community
All of the national and international news above is genuinely exciting. But some of the most meaningful acoustic music experiences happen closest to home — at outdoor venues on warm summer evenings, at neighborhood taprooms where local musicians are building a presence, and on the grounds of places that are starting to take live unplugged music seriously as a regular part of their programming.
Here in South Jersey, a handful of new acoustic events have just appeared on local calendars, and they are worth knowing about.
This Friday, July 3rd, the Bar None Duo is headlining an outdoor acoustic set at a local campground venue. Bar None brings a country-acoustic sound that is perfectly suited to an outdoor summer evening, and a July 3rd show carries its own particular energy — the kind of pre-holiday gathering where the music, the setting, and the crowd all feel like exactly the right combination at exactly the right moment. If you are looking for something genuinely low-key, live, and acoustic to anchor your long holiday weekend, this is it.
Over in Haddonfield, The Taproom featuring Santucci’s is launching something that local acoustic music fans should pay attention to. Musicians Rob and Chris are establishing a regular acoustic cover residency at the venue, beginning later this summer. Residencies like this are the building blocks of a local acoustic music scene. They give artists a committed platform to develop their performance, they give audiences a reliable, recurring reason to show up, and they give a venue an identity beyond just food and drink. The Taproom’s decision to invest in this kind of programming is exactly the kind of development that gradually transforms a neighborhood into a real destination for live music.
And at the Ramblewood Country Club in Mount Laurel, the Seven Tap Tavern has just added a brand new live acoustic sunset series to its calendar for next month. Sunset acoustic series have a way of becoming genuinely beloved community institutions when they are done right — the combination of outdoor setting, fading evening light, and stripped-back live music creates an atmosphere that is hard to manufacture and impossible to replicate with a playlist. The Ramblewood series is new, which means there is real opportunity right now to be an early part of something that could grow into a significant fixture on the South Jersey acoustic calendar. These are the shows worth showing up for from the beginning.
Why All of This Matters — The Bigger Picture for Acoustic and Unplugged Music in 2026
Step back from any single headline in this week’s news and look at the full picture, and something becomes very clear: acoustic, folk, roots, and unplugged music are not struggling for relevance in 2026. They are thriving — and they are thriving precisely because of everything they are not.
They are not chasing algorithms. They are not dependent on theatrical production. They are not built around social media metrics or playlist placement or carefully engineered moments designed to go viral. They are built around something far more durable and far more human: a person with an instrument, something true to say, and an audience willing to listen.
That is why competitions like the IBMA Songwriter Showcase and the Kerrville New Folk Competition continue to carry genuine weight — because they evaluate music on terms that cannot be gamed. That is why a radio program like Acoustic Café, which has been doing essentially the same thing for decades, still feels completely essential — because what it offers is rare. That is why the Vinyl Summit is generating the kind of excitement it is generating — because there is a growing constituency of people who not only want to hear music at the highest possible fidelity but want to understand how it is made and preserved at that level.
And that is why the Bar None Duo playing an outdoor set on July 3rd, and a new residency launching at a Haddonfield taproom, and a sunset series beginning at Ramblewood — that is why those things matter too. Because the acoustic music world is not only what happens on the national and international stage. It is what is happening in your community, in the venues close enough to walk to, on evenings warm enough to sit outside and let the music come to you.
Unplugged Live exists because all of this belongs in the same conversation. The IBMA showcase in Chattanooga and the acoustic show at your local campground this Friday are part of the same tradition. They are both expressions of the same belief: that when the production disappears and the volume comes down, the music that remains is the music that means something.
We will keep bringing you every corner of that world — the competition results, the landmark radio sessions, the milestone anniversary events, the national headliners, and the neighborhood residencies just getting started. Stay tuned, stay local, and keep listening.
Unplugged Live covers the acoustic, folk, roots, and singer-songwriter music world with the depth and attention it deserves. From major industry competitions and syndicated radio milestones to the intimate local shows happening in your own backyard, this is your home for everything that happens when the volume comes down and the music takes over.
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