Watch Shirtless, 19-Year-Old Billy Strings Play Banjo On Sidewalks Of Traverse City

Michigan native Billy Strings will begin his Summer Tour 2023 tomorrow (Thursday, July 13) with the first of three shows at Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, North Carolina. The 7,000-person capacity venue is quite different from Strings’ beginnings playing on the sidewalks of Traverse City, Michigan where he busked as a teen.

One of the first videos posted on Strings’ own official YouTube account was uploaded on June 15, 2012, when he was just 19. The footage features a shirtless, heavily tattooed Strings sitting on a bench on the sidewalks of Traverse City picking banjo with an acoustic guitar playing “random guy” he met downtown. The brief clip captures the young Strings and unnamed guitarist rolling through Ralph Stanley’s bluegrass staple “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” watch here:

A video profiling Strings that surfaced on Youtube in November 2012 showcases another instance of the young musician, still sans a shirt, playing banjo while sitting on a downtown Traverse City bench. Produced by local publication Northern Express Weekly, the “Meet Billy Strings” segment begins with clips of Strings playing guitar with others and ends with him alone once again sitting on a bench playing banjo.

“Yes, Billy Strings is a fantastic musician and a really nice guy too,” reporter Robert Downes says in the profile video. “Everyone predicts a great future for him the bluegrass and folk scene.”

Strings street-side solo performance of the Doc Watson-recorded “Country Blues” begins around the 1:45 mark in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBSIwBAAvRg?t=106