IT BEGAN, said Kinney Rorrer, with a cigar box and a lard bucket. Mr Rorrer hails from Franklin County, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. He plays banjo in the New North Carolina Ramblers and hosts a radio show. Both band and show feature acoustic string-band music, with roots in the ballads of England, Ireland and Scotland. The music has come to be known as “old-time”, and it began, explains Mr Rorrer, in the mountains: the Appalachians and the Ozarks especially, poor, isolated regions settled mainly by the Scotch-Irish. People who lacked television, radio and extra income had to entertain themselves, so they played music, like Mr Rorrer's uncles, on homemade instruments—a banjo out of a cigar box, a bass out of an upturned lard bucket.

Out of old-time music came bluegrass, which takes its name from the Blue Grass Boys, a band formed by Bill Monroe in 1938 (Monroe, a mandolinist, hailed from Kentucky, which is known as the Bluegrass state). Lester Flatt, a composer and guitarist, joined the band several years later, as did Earl Scruggs, who pioneered a distinctive three-fingered banjo-picking style. Bluegrass bands tend to feature a banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle and upright bass; the music tends to be quick, and often features a melody improvised on each instrument in turn, much like jazz. Old-time music was also father to country music, which today has its own awards show and television network, and whose biggest stars are as wealthy, polished and overproduced as any rock star.

Some still like the old ways best. For 25 years, MerleFest has drawn fans of roots music—a broad term encompassing numerous genres of American folk music—to the charming little town of Wilkesboro, in North Carolina's Brushy Mountains. This year around 80,000 attended the four-day event. Headline acts included Los Lobos, a band from East Los Angeles that blends rock and American folk with Mexican genres such as norteño; Bela Fleck, a banjo player and composer whose music sounded like a marriage of bluegrass and the Grateful Dead; and the Punch Brothers, a talented young band comprising the traditional five bluegrass instruments but with an extraordinarily wide range (their bluegrass version of Radiohead's “Kid A” is, against all expectations, revelatory: by using a bowed bass for the vocal part, they highlight that in the original version, Thom Yorke was less a singer than just another band member, using his muffled and electrified voice as just another instrument).

The Punch Brothers' banjo player is a 31-year-old from Chicago named Noam Pikelny who started taking banjo lessons when he was eight years old, drawn, he says, to “this incredible rhythmic machine” created by a banjo playing sixteenth-notes over a rhythm guitar and a mandolin playing the backbeats. He was also drawn to “the humanity of a lot of these musicians, the fact that so many of these people are so down-to-earth and well-mannered.”

That has much to do with the music's consistent but never earth-shattering level of popularity: its stars tend to be workers more than divas. In their songs of rambling, poverty and trouble there is an authenticity impossible to fake. Not for nothing has bluegrass been called “the high, lonesome sound”. Its instrumentation is intricate and hard to hum, its harmonies often unsettling, the music honest and rough as homespun cloth. Mr Fleck, who released his first album in 1979, has noticed crests and ebbs of popularity, the latter usually coming as the result of an external event—he cites the films “Deliverance”, with its minatory dueling-banjo scene, and the more recent “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, whose soundtrack features bluegrass and old-time luminaries such as Ralph Stanley. The fallow periods, he says, are essential: “If it doesn't go away, it can't come back and be exciting again.”

Of course, the music never really goes away. Its health and endurance is measured not in film or its headliners' fame, but in bands such as Jubal's Kin—two brothers and a sister, 23, 17 and 13 years old, from suburban Orlando who perform eerie, spacious, timeless but wholly modern renditions of songs written nearly a century ago. It is also measured in people such as Donna Fox, a social worker from Wilkes County, North Carolina, who could be found in one of three tents set up on the festival grounds for non-professional musicians—for people who play for the love of it, which she was doing: on a homemade bass made for $25 out of an upturned tin bucket.