Craig Havighurst has been playing music since he was seven and trying to figure out how it works for almost as long. That second project — the figuring out — turned out to be the one that defined his life. Not because it replaced the playing, but because it led him to a question most musicians never think to ask and most listeners never realize they should: what are you actually hearing when you hear music, and what are you missing?
He landed in Nashville in the late 1990s, a journalist drawn to a city that runs on sound the way other cities run on finance or government. As staff music writer for the Tennessean from 2000 to 2004, he won the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. He reported for NPR, for WPLN-FM, for the Wall Street Journal, for Acoustic Guitar and No Depression. He wrote Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, a book that documented for the first time how a single radio station — launched by an insurance company in 1925 — transformed Nashville's identity and, with it, the trajectory of American popular music. The Wall Street Journal called it a service to history, a reminder that giants once lived on the radio dial. The University of Illinois Press published it. It remains the definitive account.
Then he helped build a radio show. Music City Roots launched in 2009 from the Loveless Cafe on the outskirts of Nashville with Emmylou Harris as the first headliner and Havighurst as the on-air journalist and interviewer, seated alongside host Jim Lauderdale and announcer Keith Bilbrey. The show became a nationally syndicated weekly broadcast, a PBS television series distributed by American Public Television, and for nearly a decade one of the most important platforms for Americana, bluegrass, folk, gospel, and roots music in the country. Havighurst was its senior producer and co-host until the show's original team was forced out in 2021. By then he had already moved into his current role as editorial director of WMOT Roots Radio 89.5 FM, where he hosts The String, a weekly interview show covering culture, media, and American music. He also co-hosts The Old Fashioned, which airs Saturdays and Tuesdays. The station — a 100,000-watt NPR affiliate owned by Middle Tennessee State University — had been languishing in last place in Nashville's market ratings before adopting the Roots Radio format that Havighurst and his colleagues helped build. Within one quarter, it climbed from forty-third to the top twenty.
All of that work — the newspaper years, the radio station history, the live broadcast, the hundreds of interviews with everyone from Marcus King to the Po' Ramblin' Boys — feeds into his new book, Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist, published by the Sager Group in the fall of 2025. Kirkus named it one of the most anticipated nonfiction books of spring 2026 and called it a warm, wise guide to hearing music and each other with renewed clarity. Béla Fleck wrote that Havighurst reminds us we all have the potential to participate in the flight of great music.
The book is part memoir, part manifesto, part ear-training companion. It begins with Havighurst's own formative encounters — a high school orchestra, a listening booth at the British Museum where he first heard Wagner and felt sound rearrange something in his body — and moves outward into a tour of music's fundamental elements: tone, harmony, rhythm, timbre. It argues that Americans have drifted into passive, algorithm-guided listening habits that have narrowed our collective musical diet, and that the remedy isn't expertise but attention. Learning to listen for harmonic motion, melodic contours, the texture and color of specific instruments — what Havighurst calls the difference between listening to music and listening for something in music — is a practice available to anyone. It doesn't require a degree. It requires the willingness to sit in a room, put down the phone, and let sound do what it was designed to do.
Havighurst positions himself in the lineage of Leonard Bernstein, Wynton Marsalis, and Billy Taylor — public figures who believed that musical literacy was a civic good, that helping people hear more deeply was a form of cultural stewardship. He fills a void, he argues, left by the retreat of music education from public schools and the disappearance of thoughtful music criticism from the mainstream press. His instrument is the question — asked of the musicians he interviews, asked of the listeners he addresses, asked of himself every time he sits down to write about why a particular arrangement or performance or three-note phrase made him feel something he can't quite name but refuses to leave unexamined.
