Sometimes the Music City Roots stage looks like a gear warehouse or a Guitar Center with drums, keyboards and amplifiers all over the place. And on some recent weeks, back stage has felt more like a traffic jam than a jam session. But tonight, just when some of us needed it, there was a zen garden quality in the Loveless Barn. The stage held but a single snare drum and only one amp – a vintage Fender so beaten and road-scarred that it had to belong the Pine Hill Haints. Two of our artists needed nothing but a guitar to do their thing.

It’s not often that in one evening you can hear six artists who capture the flow and evolution of folk music, from the turn of one century to the turn of another, from pure to punk. (And yes, punk music is folk music, in case you never got that memo.) The return of Music City Roots for the summer season was a choice collection, a dipper in the stream that kept coming up clear and delicious.

Music City Roots and bluegrass music are, as the kids say, BFFs. As music goes, there’s no other scene that can top it for collective good-will, pan-generational sharing, honesty of talent and the power to bring wildly different people together. So last night, we did gorge upon it. Nine acts, ranging in age from teens to seventies, all with something to say, all with major skills, helped us wish a happy anniversary to the IBMA, the International Bluegrass Music Association.

Some come to Nashville with dreams of fame and fortune, which makes for good movie scripts but really winds up being meaningless in the long run. Others were drawn here with a burning curiosity and hope that Nashville’s musical community and history are real and knowable and fulfilling - that its mojo still lives and is accessible to those who avail themselves of it, whether as an artist, picker, producer, fan or chronicler.

We had a guy who was big in the 70s and some guys who were born in the 80s. We had the biggest band we’ve ever had on Music City Roots and the funniest artist we’ve ever had. Naturally, we had some bracing roots rock and a mod mountain-inspired songstress. That’s par for the course. But in general, for a random Wednesday in June, it was quite the night of firsts and surprises.

Jere Cherryholmes, the bearded and burly dad/bass player/bus driver in the Cherryholmes bluegrass band, said last night that he still thinks of his family’s group the way he proposed it to his kids roughly a decade ago – as an adventure. There’s no fixed star to aim at, no endgame. Just a big, audacious experience with trials and surprising delights along the way. Music City Roots is a lot like that too, and last night, MCR and Cherryholmes merged their adventures together for a little while, and it was fantastic.

You know what they say about meeting your heroes. It can either go really well or, if they’re not the human being you’d made them out to be in your youthful imagination, it can be deeply disconcerting. Happily those of us who were excited to meet Roger McGuinn at Roots last night came away from the experience with nothing but good feelings. From the heavenly opening notes of soundcheck on that signature Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar, McGuinn emanated a warm, low-key grace. By the time he got on stage, we think maybe our “surprise” had been blown, but no matter.

A great show has the stuff you were expecting when you came and the surprises that you can never plan for. And there were at least two moments last night when I was caught up short and left with nothing but a smile. First was our “emerging artist” band The Drunk Uncles who topped off a killer set of Waylon-worthy country music with a guest appearance by Larry Cordle (about whom more later).

As a lover of the English language I’m sensitive to the mis-use of words, as when people praise a singer/songwriter as ‘prolific’ when they mean wonderful or amazing. But all prolific means of course is that someone produces a lot. Some great artists like Guy Clark are not prolific. Some prolific artists are not fantastic. It’s hard to be both, but our buddy and musical host Jim Lauderdale has done just that for years. In fact it’s hard to point to anyone in Americana music who has recorded and written so many songs with such consistency.

 Back in its growth-to-glory days, one of the things that distinguished WSM was its aggressive use of remote broadcasting. They’d set up microphones at events, planned and unplanned, all over Middle Tennessee and somehow get the signal back to the WSM mother-ship for live broadcast to the nation. Decades before digital or cellular anything, they beamed news and music from a moving passenger train. They broadcast the NBC Prince Albert Grand Ole Opry from a moving steamboat in the Cumberland River.