In 1977, a band called Hot Rize arrived with fingers flying on the thriving newgrass/bluegrass scene. Among them was one Tim O'Brien, who provided mandolin, guitar and those high and lonesome vocals so redolent of the great Bill Monroe. In the mid-1980s, Hot Rize began appearing as their alter-egos, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers - a sort of parody country band specialising in beery, teary honky tonk - and bizarrely they became almost as popular as the group proper.
After a move to Nashville, O'Brien began to concentrate both on his songwriting and his many successful collaborations with his sister Mollie. But whether it was Hot Rize, Red Knuckles or the Nashville songwriter situation, all of it could be traced back to a deep love for the old music - through Bill Monroe back to Doc Watson and further back again to the actual music of his home patch of Wheeling, Virginia.
"When I was growing up, there was a stigma attached to being from West Virginia. When we went on vacation to visit my mom's relatives, we'd drive out and stop for gasoline in the flat-lands of Iowa and Nebraska and people would look in the car to see if we had shoes on. People thought `West Virginia - blood feuds, moonshine and they don't have any teeth'. But I think of my childhood as being more like Leave It To Beaver - a classic, faceless, homogenised, suburban neighbourhood. My father was an attorney, so we weren't hillbillies.
"But then 10 miles away, in the woods, there were people playing the old tunes and those older forms of country music are closer to traditional Irish music. Right around there, there were a lot of good fiddlers and banjo players and I got interested and started looking for good music. It wasn't like I grew up next to people who played the music - but maybe across the valley."
With American traditional music in such proximity, O'Brien also began to wonder about the traditional music from which much of it had come - the Irish music which also happened to be the lost legacy of his great-grandfather, Thomas O'Brien of Cavan.
Now immortalised in a Guthrie/Dylan type song called Talkin' Cavan, great-grandfather O'Brien had arrived in the US in 1851 and, it seems, immediately turned into an American. In fact, for the young Tim, there were few real traces of Irishness lingering in the West Virginia pines.
"It was always kind of mysterious and in the background. My parents didn't have much knowledge of it. I guess my father wasn't much interested in it, and I just had to search around after I became interested in it myself. Wheeling was different because there was not as big an ongoing immigration as in the big cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago.
"The main wave came in post-Famine and assimilated after a generation or two. So you're not really aware of being Irish except on St Patrick's Day. But, being a musician, I started looking for it, and the circle closed when I started looking up my relatives."
Moving to Minneapolis in 1976, O'Brien soon came into contact with Irish musicians and began playing at regular sessions, picking up more and more tunes, many of them already familiar to him in their American form. And although he always maintained a close watch on all things Irish, paying particular attention to The Bothy Band, Paul Brady and Andy Irvine, it was in the territory of bluegrass/country that his own career blossomed.
Hot Rize were a very traditional bluegrass band - even their name was taken from Hot Rize Flour made by Martha White Bakeries, the sponsors of the Flatt and Scruggs radio programme. It was a deliberate nod to the past, but O'Brien recognised that the old stigma he remembered from home was still clinging to many aspects of American music. He may not have come from the absolute inner core himself, but he was determined to fight for it even so.
"A lot of the country music TV shows used to have hay bales and people dressed in overalls. But, you know, the musicians are playing music and just doing their best. Bill Monroe, very early on, was interested in reversing that stereotype. He wanted to portray his music as a high art and he had hiddenband dress in suits and ties. They respected themselves and their audience - but he was also very emphatic that it came from the old ways. The problem is that there is a mass culture in the United States and you have to describe everything in one sentence just to make it possible to describe it to the whole country."
Perhaps nowhere is this more in evidence than in Nashville, Tennessee, O'Brien's base and the place in which he scores his more commercial successes; Garth Brooks is among a number of high-profile country stars to have recorded his songs. It's quite impossible to underestimate the significance for a songwriter to have his songs covered by the likes of Brooks but, at the same time, it all seems very far from what seems closest to Tim O'Brien's musical heart.
"Well, by and large that world spins in another orbit. But it's always out there and I kind of slip into it through the songwriting. And that's about all I really care to get into it. The record companies are in Nashville and all the publishing companies, and there are always people coming looking for musicians to do something - music for soundtracks or recordings. So it's like being by a bigger stream and you can pull a bigger fish out of there now and again.
"Before I moved to Nashville, it was like I was running around a track in my own little world. I felt that I was doing pretty good and keeping up a fairly decent pace for myself. But then I went to Nashville and things ran on a faster track, and then you start to think that maybe you were completely wrong. It affects you and it takes a little strength to realise, hey you're doing fine, just let it be. That's the key to coexisting and keeping your own soul. It's also the key to being successful on the big commercial route too. I just try to do my best and living in Nashville is a better way to support my family."
But whatever about Garth Brooks, it was with the album The Crossing that Tim O'Brien finally got to grips with Cavan. He rounded up the very best Irish and American musicians and put together an album which he hoped would celebrate those points where the two worlds met. It was, he said, "the inevitable next step for a bluesgrass singer-songwriter in his mid-40s named O'Brien". Now on tour, O'Brien is set to make his second visit to Ireland with "The Crossing" - a star-studded gather-up of America's finest who will undoubtedly spark off the best of their transatlantic cousins. Mairtin O'Connor, Kate Rusby, Darrell Scott and Danny Thompson are among those already onboard for the night - and there are others who'll very likely show up too.
LAST time around was stunning and there's no reason this will be any different. For O'Brien himself, it's another peak in those years of discovering music that has never been very far away at all - sometimes just across the valley, sometimes just across the sea.
"The good thing is that you get musicians of a certain level of proficiency and it's apparent what you've got to. You listen to the music and you size it up and you figure out how it fits together. There are places to dovetail it. There are things about the way tunes are played in America in that they sort of square them off - the rhythm section is the structure and there's more improvising with the melody. In traditional Irish music, it's the melody that's the structure. So each person has to give a little bit each way to get it together. But it's not that far apart. So what we're doing is like when you make a sauce, you cook it down, you correct the spices and you come up with a presentation that is cohesive, out of all the disparate elements. It's going to be really fun."
Tim O'Brien and The Crossing are at the HQ Hall of Fame, Middle Abbey St, Dublin on Sunday, November 5th.