Becky Buller has too many awards to keep track of. It seems that every year she finds a hugely successful collaboration to work on. She has a knack for bringing like minds together often resulting in a new addition to her expanding award cabinet/room! The International Bluegrass Music Association has recognized her at least 10 times for her songwriting, singing and fiddling with her own band or for the collaborations with others.

The Becky Buller Band has just released her sixth album called “Distance and Time” that contains this year’s IBMA Collaborative Award winning “The Barber’s Fiddle”. The song showcases a bevy of singers including Laurie Lewis, Shawn Camp, Jason Carter, Kati Penn and Sam Bush. If that isn’t enough, the tune features 18 fiddlers!!! In the same year, Becky Buller cowrote, with two of the “First Ladies of Bluegrass”; Alison Brown and Missy Raines, a new song for Special Consensus’ “Chicago Barn Dance”. The magic touch again; Song of the Year!

Our segment begins with “Southern Flavor” which features (a theme here!) a collaboration from the first generation of bluegrass players from Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys.! We follow that with the Song of the Year, “Chicago Barn Dance”. Of course, Becky gives us all the details of these projects as well as her work with “The First Ladies of Bluegrass” including award-winning instrumentalists Missy Raines, Alison Brown, Sierra Hull, and Molly Tuttle!

Our chat covers Becky’s early music years in Minnesota with her parent’s band “Prairie Grass” to writing songs for other bluegrass artists to record. We discuss the benefits and pitfalls of co-writing dozens of songs with others; especially virtually. Lots of other topics from “lockdown” family binge TV watching to “Anne of Green Gables”. Give the segment a listen in the link above. We finish with Becky’s hopeful introduction to another song from “Distance and Time” called “More Heart, Less Attack”.