It’s easy to get the wrong idea about bluegrass – to imagine that this flinty shard of American traditional music is baked centuries deep into the soil of Appalachia. In fact it developed in the 1940s, pioneered by Kentucky maestro Bill Monroe, and only truly flourished during the American folk revival of the 1960s. Bluegrass was one of the few places where the hippies and good ol’ boys found communion; the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was a devotee.

The style has evolved, generation upon generation, via exponents such as Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and Del McCoury. The latest bluegrass star is William Lee Apostol, aka Billy Strings, a 33-year-old guitarist, singer and songwriter from Michigan, whose backstory reads like some grisly American gothic melodrama. His biological father died of a heroin overdose when he was two and his mother, Debra, and stepfather were both meth addicts. Though now free of alcohol and hard drugs, Strings struggled with his own addictions; for the avoidance of doubt, his debut album was called Turmoil & Tinfoil.

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So Much for Goodbyes, his fifth, is dedicated to Debra, who died last year. It’s a........

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