When the phone rang on the first Friday afternoon of December, the 80-year-old singer Alice Gerrard answered from her upstairs office. She once ran a journal devoted to old-time music from the spare room, but she was in the middle of a Photoshop lesson when Josh Rosenthal, the founder of the label Tompkins Square, called. Follow the Music, her first record with the imprint, had earned a Grammy nomination for “Best Folk Album.”

About time, it seemed.

During the last six decades, Gerrarda Washington state native who became an integral part of Washington, D.C.’s folk scenehas earned heaps of acclaim for her pioneering role in bluegrass and old-time music. She rose to national attention in the early ’60s with her singing-and-songwriting partner Hazel Dickens. Widely regarded as the first female-fronted bluegrass outfit, they toured the United States extensively into the ’70s.

Gerrard won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2001, and she’s collected plaudits from organizations such as the North Carolina Folklore Society and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. But this is her first Grammy nomination.

Best known for his work as Hiss Golden Messenger, Mike Taylorlike Gerrard, a transplant to Durham and the Southproduced the LP. He tapped Megafaun brothers Brad and Phil Cook and several other young North Carolina musicians as key pieces of the backing band. Though it remains traditional at the core, Follow the Music pushes Gerrard just far enough from the familiar for her to seem revitalized. She shines on an upbeat, banjo-heavy “Boll Weevil” and stuns over the fiddle drone of “Bear Me Away.”

A mother of four and a grandmother of nine, Gerrard is sharp-witted and kind. But her attitude toward the Grammy hoopla could be called cool at best: “Oh, I could care less,” she mumbles.

Gerrard doesn’t need another award or plaque, really. Half a century of musical ephemera and colorful doodles by the grandchildren already crowd the walls of her cozy two-story home in Durham’s Lakewood neighborhood. Atop a living room bookshelf, ghostly markings mar Carter Stanley’s face on an old Stanley Brothers concert bill. Many years ago, one of the kids decided the guitarist might look better with a pencil-drawn moustache and glasses. When Gerrard tried to erase the graffiti, she only made it permanent.

A month after the surprise call from Rosenthal, Gerrard sat downstairs at her cluttered kitchen table for two hours to talk about her history and why it doesn’t require rewards.