Molly Tuttle doesn’t need electricity to make electrifying music. Check out her acoustic guitar playing on “San Joaquin,” a rollicking bluegrass tune from her Grammy-winning album “City of Gold.”

“San Joaquin finds Tuttle trading hot licks with her touring band Golden Highway, featuring fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, bassist Shelby Means and Kyle Tuttle on banjo.

“That one’s super-fast,” Molly says of the track, adding a laugh over the phone on a recent afternoon, “so that makes it exciting inherently. But what makes music exciting to me is discovering something new, sharing who I am with the world, things I’m interested in.”

Tuttle makes bluegrass that sounds both authentic and current.

The 31-year-old musician believes this is partly because she grew up in Palo Alto, California, far away from the genre’s 1940s Appalachian roots. “I felt like kind of an outsider looking in at this music I thought was really cool,” Tuttle says.

As a listener, she’s always gravitated towards traditional bluegrassers like Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs.

“Stuff that feels really raw and fresh,” Tuttle says. “So when I went to write my own bluegrass songs, it was like how can I take that part that I love about the music, where it sounds so authentic and old-fashioned in a way, but tell my story and give a little twist to it?

“That’s what I’ve tried to do. Keep some of that language and style and the chords, but also add in to new elements of my own. I was born in the ‘90s and I grew up on the West Coast. My life is gonna be pretty different than the people who were playing bluegrass back then.”

In the digital age, Tuttle’s approach to an analog artform is connecting. On Spotify her tracks — including her take on a traditional folk song, “Bury Me Beneath The Willow” from the “Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” soundtrack — have been streamed tens of millions of times.

Tuttle’s two most recent albums, her fourth LP “City of Gold” and 2022′s “Crooked Tree,” each won Grammys for Best Bluegrass Album. In 2022, she also was nominated in the genre-fluid Best New Artist category.

She says the second Grammy, which she and her band were awarded in February for “City of Gold,” means more to her. This is mainly because her backing band Golden Highway hadn’t fully formed yet when she made “Crooked Tree.”

“For the second one,” Tuttle says, “we’re gonna get Grammys, which is a really special feeling. I would have never thought this is going to happen again. Like, we’re gonna win a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album two years in a row. That was pretty surreal, winning back-to-back Grammys, and it felt great to get to share it with my band. But they were both wonderful surprises.”

At the time of our mid-April conversation, Tuttle and her band hadn’t received their Grammy trophies yet. She says the previous year’s Grammy, lately on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame, didn’t arrive, though, until May or June.

Tuttle’s made different plans for her second gramophone-shaped award. “When we all get our Grammys, we’re definitely going to do shots out of them,” she says.

Tuttle checks in for this phoner from her Prius, parked outside a coffee shop in Nashville, the city where she’s now based.

Her dad, Jack Tuttle — who still to this day teaches lessons on banjo, fiddle, guitar and mandolin — relocated from his family’s Illinois farm to Northern California in the ‘80s. He was drawn there by the vibrant bluegrass scene centered on new masters like David Grisman and Tony Rice.

Tuttle started playing guitar at age 8. She says starting early was a huge advantage.

“I feel like when you learn something that’s very technical at a young age,” Tuttle says, “it just kind of becomes second nature in a different way than it would if I started when I was, you know, 16 or 17.”

She made another quantum leap forward in guitar skills when she began studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music at age 19. “When I got to Berklee I was OK at guitar. I could play songs and sound clean and play fast and come up with ideas. But I wasn’t great at improvising, I didn’t know any scales and didn’t know any music theory. Learning some of that made me progress relatively quickly in a couple of years.”

With her speedy chops and melodic sense for days, Tuttle’s a dazzling picker. In October 2023, Rolling Stone featured her in that prestigious music and culture magazine’s latest “Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list. She clocked in at number 222, ahead of legendary guitarists like Andy Summers of The Police, The Doors’ Robby Krieger, Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and “Mississippi Queen” rocker Leslie West.

Rolling Stone’s list had some glaring exclusions (shredder Yngwie Malmsteen, Kiss legend Ace Frehley and jazzer George Benson, for starters) and eyeroll-inducing inclusions. But Tuttle was a bona fide pick.

She first got the news she’d made the RS’ list via email — or maybe text, she can’t quite recall which.

“And it blew my mind,” Tuttle says. “I was like, whoa, best guitar players of all time, and that was crazy to see my name amongst those other players. Obviously, any list of the best ‘blank’ ever is going to be subjective, and there’s no real, like, best when it comes to music. But it was very cool.”

Her main instrument is a made-to-her-specs model from Pre-War Guitars Co. of North Carolina. “It’s meant to sound like a vintage guitar,” she says. “I used it on the last two records, and I use it live, and that’s kind of my main axe these days.”

Tuttle’s also becoming a stirring singer, a skill that didn’t come as naturally to her at first, she says.

“I loved playing guitar, but when I was singing, I felt like I could really express what I was feeling inside in a different way. That made me want to work at singing, a lot. And when I’m singing, I still sometimes get in my head about like, OK, am I going to hit this note? I still kind of think about that when I’m on stage.”

On “Yosemite,” a standout off her “City of Gold” album, Tuttle duets with jam-band icon Dave Matthews. She’d written the song on a cross-country drive during the pandemic. Trying to think of her ideal singing partner for the song, Matthews came to mind. Previously, she and her band had opened for him at show in Mexico. They’d jammed a little bit, she had his phone number and Matthews had previously collaborated with bluegrassers like Bela Fleck.

Tuttle texted Matthews the song. She thought he probably wouldn’t respond and might not even receive the message.

“But he responded right away,” Tuttle says, “and was like, ‘Sure, I’d love to sing on it.’ He sang it in his studio and sent the parts in and they sounded great. It was just cool to get to hear his voice singing words that I wrote.”

Besides Matthews and dobro ace Jerry Douglas, who co-produced the LP with Tuttle, there aren’t many musical cameos on “City of Gold,” which features co-writes with the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, who’s also Tuttle’s romantic partner.

“Crooked Tree,” however, was heavy on notable roots-music guests, including Margo Price, Billy Strings, Gillian Welch, Sierra Hull, all of Old Crow Medicine Show, and Union Station’s Dan Tyminski, among many others.

“Each song,” Tuttle says, “the theme of the song or the music itself would remind me of this person; we should ask them to sing on it. I just wanted to celebrate this music that’s such a communal type of music. I grew up going to jam sessions, bluegrass festivals, and you just get together with friends and play music. Since moving to Nashville, I’ve made a whole bunch of friends.”

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway open for Old Crow Medicine Show on Friday at Sand Mountain Amphitheater in Albertville, Alabama. Tickets are $52 (plus fees) and up via etix.com. Complete tour dates and more info at mollytuttlemusic.com.

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