First Listen: Della Mae, 'The Butcher Shoppe'

In the thoroughly collaborative bluegrass world, where musicians continually embark on new lineups and side projects with kindred pickers in their circles, it's hardly a given that a band would last a decade — especially one with a beginning as facetious as Della Mae's. Early on in the tenure of what was once the only string band on the circuit made up entirely of women, fiddle-playing founder Kimber Ludiker was, "When I started this band, I started it actually as a joke. Late at night with a group of friends at a music camp in California, we were joking around about how fun it would be to start an all-female bluegrass band that played high-testosterone, really fast bluegrass music — what we called 'mangrass.'"