Erin Lunsford: Music From Her Roots

by Charles McGuigan 08.2026

Erin Lunsford was born, bred, and buttered in Appalachia near the last stop of the Great Wilderness Road in the Town of Fincastle, Virginia.  Her mom, Cheryl, plays guitar (teaches it, too); her mother’s father,  Andy Boothe (Erin’s Paw Paw), plays banjo.   “My whole family plays bluegrass,” Erin tells me. 

So it’s no surprise that much of the music she writes and plays is informed by the American roots music she grew up around. There’s no escaping that; it seems to be bred-in-the-bone. As a matter of fact, her latest album, “Rhinestones,” gives more than a gentle nod to her musical heritage.

Erin has the ability to dip deep into the well of mountain music, and then blend it with a little indie, a smattering of traditional country, a dash of the blues, a sprinkling of folk protest, and a command of meter and rhyme and metaphor generally ascribed to only the most gifted poets. The result is Americana, though I believe her work defies genre identification.

“Rhinestones,” released last month, features twelve of her songs that display the range of her talent in both her vocals and her instrumentation, as well as her ability as a songwriter to tell a moving and memorable story. She plays acoustic guitar and clawhammer banjo flawlessly. And her voice will carry you to heights you might have thought were beyond the human range. 

Erin’s musical career began the year she became a teenager. She and her mother, both on acoustic guitars, would join their voices in perfect harmony and perform at dive bars in Roanoke. “We covered a lot of Dolly Parton,” says Erin. “A lot of Melissa Etheridge and Norah Jones. And we also did a lot of jazz standards and Gypsy Jazz.”

“But one of your great loves is Appalachian folk music, right?” I ask.

Erin nods rapidly. “Yeah,” she says. “It makes me feel connected to my roots, and connected to my family.”

Her mother’s side of the family—Irish/Welsh stock—settled generations ago in Floyd County, where they have remained ever since. On her dad’s side, Erin thinks she might be distantly related to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a folklorist and banjo player from North Carolina, who was known as the Minstrel of the Appalachians.

“So, I feel most connected to my family when I'm playing music,” says Erin. “I feel the lineage, especially on my mom's side of things.”

She mentions her great, great maternal grandmother named Delphia. She was a folk singer who may have actually penned ‘Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone,’ a song generally attributed to the Carter family. “But there's no way for us to know for sure,” Erin says. Delphia died nearly a century ago of tuberculosis in the Catawba Sanatorium on the site of Roanoke Red Sulphur Springs. She was just 34 years old, a year younger than Erin is today.

As a teenager, along with the performances with her mother, Erin played at a number of fiddlers conventions throughout Southwest Virginia. After she graduated from high school, she attended the University of Virginia and earned degrees in music and psychology.

It was in Charlottesville, where she lived for a decade, that Erin began performing in earnest.  That’s where she formed her band, Erin and the Wildfire, which is still going strong today, fifteen years later. She plays guitar and does lead vocals. Her lead guitarist is Ryan Lipps, with Matt Wood on bass and Nick Quillen on drums.

“That’s when I started really making music all the time,” says Erin. “We played every place you can think of in Charlottesville, from the smallest to the biggest. We’ve been on every stage in that town. But Wildfire is indie, pop, soul. It’s really different than my Appalachian Roots stuff and what I’m doing on ‘Rhinestones.’”

She tells me she gains inspiration from songs she heard even as a child. “The folk songs that I learned back then,” says Erin. “And from people that I grew up listening to like Dolly Parton. She is one of my absolute favorite musicians and songwriters. I love telling stories and that's what I loved about bluegrass music and the ballads. What comes to top of my mind is ‘Pretty Polly.’”

Erin talks about her craft, and how a song is given birth. “I almost always start off with a chorus hook,” she says. “And that becomes a kind of thesis statement of the song, and I build around that. A lot of times that chorus hook comes with a melody.”

That was certainly the case for the title song of her recent album. “My rhinestones won't stick, that’s what came to me first, that was the original line,” she says. “And then, my diamonds won’t shine. After that I started filling in.”

The next lines came readily. “My sequins get caught in my hair, my thighs are too thick, you say I'm past my prime. You may not see a star but I'm going to get there.” And then the triumph of resilience even when you’re beaten down. “I'm going to shine so bright. You can't look away from my light.” Because it’s blinding.

“It’s a redemption story,” says Erin.  “It's about the glamour, the facade of musicianship. The lipstick, the performative aspect that can sometimes hide the realness of it. I've had a lot of rejections, I've had a lot of failures. And I've had a lot of successes. So overall that song is about not giving up no matter what it looks like.”

But Erin does enjoy performing. “I also think of myself as a performer and I love it,” she says. “But it is difficult to balance sometimes. I have a forward-facing person that I am with the audience. And then I have my recluse self who's on the couch reading a book and doesn't talk to anyone all day long.”

She sings the entire song for me and by the end of it I am in tears of a hard-fought joy because that’s what real art does for humanity: it informs us about ourselves through the experiences of others, and by so doing makes us more whole.

Erin then tells me about a true protest song she wrote back in the summer of 2023. She’d seen a news story somewhere that was spreading nativist lies about immigrants.

“It was telling people how we should be worried about immigrants taking our resources,” Erin remembers. “Something racist, right? And I don't think that way at all. I think immigrants make us stronger. Diversity makes us stronger. It's always a blessing. Often, in American culture, we get caught up in that scarcity mindset where we're like, ‘I get what's mine and keep what's mine.”

So she wrote a song about a proverbial garden where everyone is welcome. “I wrote this to help shift us to an abundance mindset where there's plenty for everyone if we just share and take care of each other,” says Erin.

In this era of ICE agents and detainment camps, this song called “Strawberries” resonates like one of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads.

Here’s a portion the lyrics:

“When I need peace and I'm feeling it hard,

my mind goes to the quiet of the garden.

A place for us to go, we welcome everyone in.

I don't have to do anything but hold your hand.

“My mind goes to strawberries and butterfly wings,

bunny rabbits in the Joe Pye weed,

peppers in the sun, persimmons on the tree.”

Listen to it all on her latest album so you hear her haunting vocals drive home each song she composed.

At the end of the interview, this singer-songwriter from Appalachia tells me this about herself, which I think is true of all real artists.

“I am a conduit for the creativity,” says Erin Lunsford.  “And when the muse strikes I have to honor it.”

That, she does.