Mountain Home Music Company: Ensuring Tech Serves the Sound

You wouldn’t think the future of bluegrass music would run through a little town called Arden, North Carolina. But that’s where Mountain Home Music Company sits — a label with its boots in the dirt of tradition and its eyes staring straight down the road toward tomorrow. For a genre built on stories older than paved highways, this is the kind of balancing act that either makes you a pioneer or leaves you a relic. Mountain Home knows which one it wants to be.

Founded in 1993 by Mickey Gamble and Tim Surrett as a humble offshoot of Crossroads Label Group, Mountain Home started as a home for bluegrass gospel. But like most things that start small, it grew restless. The label widened its scope, built a catalog of some of the finest bluegrass pickers and singers around, and quietly became the kind of place where a young artist could find a future — without losing their past.

Jon Weisberger has been driving that vision since 2019. The former bass player, songwriter, and bluegrass lifer took on the A&R role at Mountain Home with the quiet understanding that this music lives or dies by its ability to move forward without forgetting who brought it here. “I went to work for the label part-time at the beginning of 2019, and then full-time in August of that year,” Weisberger said. He didn’t say it like a man taking a job. He said it like a man joining a cause.

The label's latest bet on the future is a bold one — Dolby Atmos, an immersive audio format designed not for front porches, but for movie theaters and home systems with smart soundbars and overhead speakers. In other words, the exact opposite of the cabin-in-the-holler stereotype bluegrass has carried for decades.

“We were basically the first through the entrance, and we’re still the major player in bluegrass, to be releasing stuff in Dolby Atmos immersive audio,” Weisberger said. “And what’s unique about the Atmos system is that it’s a smart system that tailors what gets sent to whatever Atmos-compatible devices it finds at the other end.”

It might sound like heresy in a genre where the warmth of a Martin guitar or the scrape of fiddle strings are as sacred as church pews. But Weisberger knows better. For bluegrass — a music born around a single microphone in the 1940s and built on tight harmonies and close playing — this technology doesn’t erase the soul of the music. It expands it.

“It’s actually really good for acoustic music because it means that immersive audio mixing… means that you can do less processing of the instrument sound, so you get a more natural, closer to the real thing kind of sound,” Weisberger explained.

In a way, technology is finally catching up to what Bill Monroe figured out 80 years ago, according to Weisberger: get the sound right in the room, get the players standing close enough, and let the music tell the story. Mountain Home has made storytelling its business, and their lifetime roster reads like a bluegrass festival lineup stretching across generations. There’s Balsam Range and The Grascals. Sister Sadie is straddling the line between bluegrass and country. The young banjo innovator Trey Wellington is steeped in jazz influences but rooted in the hills.

“To me, it’s important that our roster as a whole represents the diversity of bluegrass and that balance between tradition and innovation,” Weisberger said. “We kind of balance on the macro level, so to speak, with the variety that we have in our artists.”

That variety isn’t just for show. It’s a business strategy, a survival plan in a music industry where streaming has changed the rules of engagement. Selling CDs off the stage might still pay for gas money, but the real future is online. Mountain Home knows this because they’ve seen the numbers.

“The record business these days is the streaming business, and that’s where the listeners are. That’s where the money is,” Weisberger said. “We love and appreciate radio… but most artists will tell you that CD sales are way, way down. And physical products only account for about 10% of the recorded music revenue.”

So, Mountain Home does what smart bluegrass musicians always do — adapt without compromise. They help artists build streaming audiences with one song, one click, one honest performance at a time. It’s not flashy. It’s just work. And that same philosophy extends to how the label signs new artists. They’re looking for lifers, not hobbyists. Weisberger said it plainly: “One of the things that we look for a lot is people who are lifers, people who are really dedicated and committed to making a career in music an integral part of their life.”

In 2024, Mountain Home added Vicki Vaughn, Jesse Smathers, and veteran Gina Britt to its growing family—a lineup that looks a lot like the genre itself: young faces with old souls and old hands with something new to say.

The label’s reputation for community runs deep. Mountain Home projects like Bluegrass at the Crossroads and Bluegrass Sings Paxton are built on collaboration — a who's-who of bluegrass voices stepping into the studio together to see what happens. It’s the kind of thing that occurs naturally in bluegrass circles, where everybody knows everybody else from the road or the picking tent backstage.

“I like to hear people play together. I think it’s really fun to put different combinations and groups of people together and hear what they do,” Weisberger said. “To me, that just unleashes a lot of creative energy.”

That creative energy is the fuel driving Mountain Home toward its next chapter. Weisberger doesn’t claim to know exactly what the label will look like in ten years. But he knows the direction.

“Musically, it’s the artists that we have and the artists that we will be bringing on who will set the pace, the direction musically,” he said. “We exist to help our artists get their musical vision realized and out where people can hear it.”

At the end of the day, Mountain Home Music Company is doing what bluegrass has always done best. They’re telling stories. They’re playing real music on real instruments. And now, thanks to Dolby Atmos and a vision for what’s next, they’re doing it in a way that might just shake the floorboards of some living room halfway across the world.

So, by trying to deliver the truest sound with the best technology, Mountain Home is carrying the truths of today into everyone’s tomorrow.