It was a humid night in July, and the patrons of Atomic Clock Brewing looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I asked if they knew who Dolly Parton was.
Of course they knew Dolly: her charity, her looks, her vibes. Some mentioned songs like “Jolene” or “9 to 5.” Others called her an angel. But no one knew that this converted 1920s-era municipal garage in Durham was once home to the small record label that released some of her most critically acclaimed music.
Parton’s bluegrass albums in the late ‘90s and early 2000s were head-turning masterpieces that have been credited with revitalizing the career of the everything-to-everyone icon who died Tuesday at age 80. Parton told musicologist Lydia Hamessley that Little Sparrow was the “purest thing she has ever done,” while musicians have praised Parton’s bluegrass as deeply influential. What is mind-blowing today, as fans around the world mourn her death, is that Nashville’s country music establishment had written Parton off as commercially unviable at that time.
“I couldn’t get a decent deal with a good big label,” Parton said in 2004, when she was 58. “I’m past the age group where they thought I could sell records for them.”
Parton landed at Durham’s Sugar Hill Records—a plucky independent label that released hundreds of albums for more than 100 artists and bands from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s. Sugar Hill launched and sustained the careers of highly respected musicians, ranging from bluegrass virtuosos and renowned singer-songwriters to Texas troubadours and offbeat folk artists, collecting shelves full of awards.
“You can’t really think of bluegrass in its recorded music without thinking of Sugar Hill,” said acclaimed mandolinist Sierra Hull, 34. “It’s been a pivotal, pivotal part of the history.”
Sugar Hill’s founder, Barry Poss, set out to build a label for contemporary acoustic music with traditional roots. He hired talented staff who devised wacky gimmicks and catchy album covers to win attention for artists. The resulting body of work built sonic bridges from front porches and roadhouses to stereos around the world.
Twenty years after the label’s Durham offices closed, the accolades continue to roll in. Already a member of the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame in Wilkesboro, Poss will be inducted into both the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in October.
“You can’t really think of bluegrass in its recorded music without thinking of Sugar Hill.”
Sierra Hull, mandolinist
“It was the top of the mountain,” said Dolphus Ramseur, who manages the Avett Brothers and chairs the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. “[Sugar Hill] might not be so well known, but they had a hell of a lot of respect.”
But at Atomic Clock that night back in July, no one knew that award-winning musicians once darkened its doorways, or that receptionists used to swat away callers seeking to speak to Parton.
In fact, only one of the 30 or so people I talked to that night had even heard of Sugar Hill.
Finding Future Superstars
Poss launched Sugar Hill Records in 1978 from his townhouse on Green Street in a shady neighborhood north of Durham’s downtown.
In the early days, Poss used sleight of hand to hide the fact that Sugar Hill was a one-man band. When the phone rang, he posed as a receptionist who would check to see if “Mr. Poss was available.” When a Billboard reporter asked about executive leadership, he conjured names from outside his window.
“I saw the landlord’s son walk by; he quickly became VP of operations, the postman became A&R director, and my wife, who moonlighted her computer skills in writing our first royalty program, became our Chief Financial Officer,” Poss recalled in liner notes for an anniversary collection. “I was very proud of our management team.”
Two things Poss did not have to fake: A nose for talent and a knack for getting it signed.
Sugar Hill’s first release was from Boone Creek, a short-lived bluegrass band from Lexington, Kentucky, made up of Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, Terry Baucom, and Wes Golding. One Way Track was one of just two albums the hugely talented group recorded before breaking up.
“You can compare it to the 1984 UNC basketball team with Sam Perkins and Michael Jordan and Brad Dougherty,” said Art Menius, the Hillsborough-based founding director of the International Bluegrass Music Association, which Poss helped establish. “All on the same team, three future superstars in the NBA.”
“I couldn’t get a decent deal with a good big label. I’m past the age group where they thought I could sell records for them.”
Dolly Parton in 2004
Skaggs, whose accolades include 14 Grammys and plaques in six music halls of fame, led Boone Creek with spitfire mandolin and his distinctive tenor. He left the band to play with Emmylou Harris, whom he had met at a late-night jam session, before returning to Sugar Hill in 1979 to record his first solo effort, Sweet Temptation.
That album, Sugar Hill’s sixth, proved to be a turning point for both the artist and label.
Skaggs and Poss assembled top-flight session players, including Harris on backup vocals, with future North Carolina Heritage Award winner Marc Pruett picking banjo and Buddy Emmons on pedal steel guitar. With crisp recording and tight instrumentals, the album switched seamlessly between bluegrass standards and swinging country tunes.
Recorded in two days on a $10,000 budget, Sweet Temptations was a huge success. A single, “I’ll Take the Blame”—which Poss and his wife packed for shipping by hand—got solid radio play, making the Billboard charts and powering the album to sell 150,000 copies.
The next year, Sugar Hill released an acoustic duets album featuring Skaggs and the late North Carolinian Tony Rice, a celebrated guitarist. The Washington Post described Skaggs and Rice in a review as “all bones—the only instruments are mandolin and guitar,” adding, “the voices of Rice and Skaggs blend and curl around the lyrics as if they were family.”
Skaggs soon signed with Epic, a major Nashville label, and became one of country music’s biggest stars.
As Skaggs was taking off, Poss was continuing to assemble his roster.
Poss signed progressive bluegrass bands like the Seldom Scene, the Country Gentlemen, and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. He inked Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. He landed Peter Rowan, who had played with the “father of bluegrass,” Bill Monroe, and opened for The Doors as a member of the psychedelic band Earth Opera. The resulting albums featured experimental songwriting and inventive arrangements that pushed the boundaries of traditional genres.
Poss reached a deal with Epic to co-release Skaggs’s albums, creating a windfall that kept the catalogue growing. He then moved Sugar Hill from his apartment to a basement office on Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard and hired his first employee, publicist Penny Parsons, who spent the next decade at the label.
A Canadian Comes to Durham
Poss was born in 1945 in Brantford, Ontario, a rural town about 70 miles west of Niagara Falls. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Toronto, one of three sons to Polish and Lithuanian immigrants.
In 1968, Poss moved to Durham to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Duke University. Poss and his wife, Sharon, first took in bluegrass music at Cat’s Cradle, then newly opened in Chapel Hill. He began taking old-time banjo lessons, while Sharon played guitar. The couple crisscrossed the South meeting and learning from the region’s musicians, and sharpened their skills at fiddler’s conventions, where musicians camped and traded licks.
By the time Poss began working on his dissertation, he was playing more banjo than writing. He dropped out of Duke to take a job at County Records, in Floyd, Virginia, which specialized in old-time music. Hired as a graphic artist, he soon began producing albums, including a collection of fiddle tunes by the late West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd.
“It was the top of the mountain. [Sugar Hill] might not be so well known, but they had a hell of a lot of respect.”
Dolphus Ramseur, chair of the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame
Poss loved the banjo and fiddle-driven old-time music, but was restless to create a more expansive soundscape. He credited Boone Creek’s Douglas with helping marry traditional sounds with contemporary tastes.
“Jerry Douglas, I think, had as much to do with the Sugar Hill sound as anyone,” Poss later reflected. He “captured that tension between the old and the new that I was looking for.”
Douglas was born in a steel town outside of Cleveland, Ohio, but his family’s Appalachian roots trace back two centuries. As a child, he visited his grandparents in West Virginia, where friends gathered on the porch to play.
“It was part of my DNA,” said Douglas, now 70. “It was something you could improvise over after you knew how to play—and I loved the melodies.”
Douglas had wide-ranging tastes: “I’d be listening to bluegrass in the morning, and at night be hearing the rock stations, and trying to make this go together somehow.”
Douglas initially wanted to learn banjo, but when he heard a resonator guitar, he was hooked. Often referred to as a Dobro, resonators have no frets, allowing players to move fluidly between notes like a trombone. The instrument sits in the lap or hangs from a neck strap, strings pointed skyward. Using metal finger picks to pluck melodies above a hubcap-like cover, players change notes on the neck with a weighted metal slide reminiscent of a silver finger missing its knuckles.
Whether you know his name or not, you have probably heard Douglas play. Over a 50-year career, he has redefined the Dobro’s boundaries, recording on 1,500 albums with artists ranging from Ray Charles to Mumford and Sons, and collecting 16 Grammys.
“You can argue about who the best guitar player is, or the best upright bass player, or this or that, but I don’t think there’s any argument as to who the best Dobro player is,” said Steve Buckingham, whose credits include producing 18 albums for Parton.
Douglas released his own albums with Sugar Hill, appeared on countless others, and produced—or informally advised on—many more. Poss counted on him to fill the gaps with his musical knowledge and instincts. The two also became close friends; Poss was godfather to Douglas’s daughter.
One of Douglas’s memorable appearances was on The Grass Is Blue, Parton’s first Sugar Hill recording, in 1999.
Buckingham, who had joined the label when Welk Music Group bought it the previous year, worked with Poss on Parton’s album to assemble a group of musicians so talented that Parton dubbed them “God’s bluegrass band.” When the International Bluegrass Music Association named it album of the year, Parton was speechless.
“I’d never seen her like that—she was so overwhelmed that she had been accepted by the bluegrass community,” Buckingham said during a phone interview in early August. “But you know, it was natural to her because she knew the music … she knew the stuff, she was a mountain girl.”
Douglas plays a cat-and-mouse game with Parton’s powerful singing throughout the album. His subtle licks answer Parton’s call on a spare cover of the Johnny Cash song “I Still Miss Someone,” and add emotional depth to songs like “Endless Stream of Tears.”
Then there’s his rollicking solo in “Train, Train,” a bluegrass cover of rock and roll that Parton performed live during her 1999 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Footage from the event shows Parton strutting over to Douglas as they perform, watching his fingers fly.
“How do you do that?!” Parton exclaimed. “Woah!”
Influencing the Next Generation
Sierra Hull, a seven-time winner of the IBMA’s mandolin player of the year award, ranks The Grass is Blue among her all-time favorites.
Hull grew up in Byrdstown, Tennessee, a tiny town hugging the Kentucky border. When she wasn’t playing mandolin, Hull spent hours in her bedroom listening to music and poring over the liner notes of CDs her parents bought weekly at Walmart.
During an interview in July, Hull called Parton one of her biggest heroes, a fellow Tennessean who is “near and dear to my heart.” But when describing The Grass is Blue, her focus was on the fine recording and musicianship.
“When I think about wanting to even make another bluegrass record myself at some point, that album comes to mind,” Hull said.“Even if I could scratch the surface of something really epic like that, I’d love to.”
But Hull credits a different Sugar Hill artist with opening her ears to the possibilities of the mandolin. On “Ode to a Butterfly,” which opens Nickel Creek’s self-titled debut, Chris Thile’s mandolin seems to float through the song.
“That was such a pivotal moment for me,” Hull said. “Suddenly [we] tried to get our hands on anything we could by Chris Thile.”
Thile was a wunderkind. He took up mandolin at 5 years old, and was soon wowing audiences at bluegrass festivals around the country. At 13, he released his debut, Leading Off, on Sugar Hill in 1994. Stealing Second came three years later. And in 2001, before he could legally drink, Thile appeared on Parton’s Little Sparrow, the second of her Sugar Hill bluegrass albums.
Sugar Hill “never tried to steer the music in any particular direction,” said his father, Scott Thile, who managed his son’s early career alongside his wife. “They just were interested in what Chris was doing, and allowed him to be the creative force behind the recording projects.”
He also credits Poss with helping land Alison Krauss to produce Nickel Creek’s first album, which eventually went platinum. “I don’t think we would have been brave enough to go down that road,” he said.
Thile, 45, has achieved global fame with Nickel Creek, his solo career, and a second band, the Punch Brothers. The MacArthur Foundation awarded him its $500,000 “genius” grant in 2012, crediting him with “creating a distinctly American canon for the mandolin and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike.”
Hull wasn’t the only young mandolin player Thile impressed.
“It was probably Nickel Creek when I became aware of what Sugar Hill was,” said Sarah Jarosz. “Like, ‘oh, all this music that I’m listening to, it’s on Sugar Hill,’ and so there must be something to this label.”
A multi-instrumentalist from Wimberly, Texas, Jarosz, 35, has won six Grammys in a career spanning bluegrass, folk, and rock. She grew up listening to mixtapes her dad made, and received a mandolin for Christmas at age 9. Another long-time Sugar Hill artist, Tim O’Brien, influenced both her music and her style.
“Traveler came out when I was in eighth grade, and that’s the one with the Chuck Taylors on the cover,” Jarosz said of O’Brien’s 2003 solo album. “I got a pair of Chuck Taylors that year and wore them because I just thought he was so cool.”
At 18, she recorded the first of four albums for Sugar Hill, joining a long line of Texas musicians on the label ranging from Townes Van Zant to James McMurtry. Jarosz was particularly taken by McMurtry, whose songs are filled with sharp observations of politics, economic disparities, and life’s sometimes harsh realities.
“When it comes to songwriting, he’s my hero,” she said. “It just goes to show the kind of open ears—open mindedness—of the label to also include that music, and it was very influential to me as a writer and a musician.”
A Call from a Legend
Nearly a decade before Hull and Jarosz were born, Poss got a call he would never forget. A smooth mountain accent was on the line: “Son, I like the music you make, and I’d like to make a record for you.”
It was Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson.
Born to subsistence farmers in 1923 and blind from a young age, Watson started his career busking in the mountain town of Boone. A breakout performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1961 led to a long career and international fame.
“There may not be a serious, committed baby-boomer alive who didn’t at some point in his or her youth, try to spend a few minutes at least, trying to learn to pick a guitar like Doc Watson,” President Bill Clinton said of the Deep Gap native when awarding him the National Medal of Arts in 1997.
One of Watson’s signature songs was “Deep River Blues,” adapted from Alton and Rabon Delmore, guitar-playing brothers popular on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1930s. Watson collapsed the Delmores’ two guitar parts into one, punching out a tight bassline with his thumb while using a single index finger to pick the bright melody that took him 10 years to learn.
All the while, he crooned tongue-twisters like “My old gal, she’s a sweet old pal, she walks just like a waterfowl,” in his Blue Ridge tenor. Despite performing three parts at once, Watson’s playing looked effortless, hands barely moving as he made chuckles and asides.
This singular talent had made Watson a towering figure by the time Sugar Hill released Down South in 1984, recorded with his son, Merle, and a tight backing band. Signing Watson, “was the highlight of my career,” Poss said. “At that point I had it made.”
Watson, who died in 2012, recorded a dozen albums for Sugar Hill. His stature further built the label’s reputation.
“Doc Watson was a person that everyone looked up to and respected,” said legendary mandolinist Sam Bush, who first played with him in the ’70s. He appeared on many of Watson’s albums, including Riding the Midnight Train and On Praying Ground—both of which won Grammys for Sugar Hill.
“I would play differently when I’d play with Doc because his playing was so to-the-point, and just all the notes always seemed right and perfect,” said Bush, who also recorded for the label as a solo artist and with New Grass Revival.
Bush is among the many Sugar Hill artists who trek to Wilkesboro each spring for MerleFest, the four-day festival named for Watson’s son, who died in a tractor accident in 1985.
Founded in 1988 and powered by a legion of volunteers, MerleFest has raised millions of dollars for Wilkes Community College and local charities. Parton played MerleFest in 2001, an appearance Poss helped arrange. “He called me one night—one afternoon—and said, ‘Dolly wants to play MerleFest, but they’re worried about security, can you handle it?’” recalled the festival’s inaugural director, Frederick “B” Townes. The appearance broke attendance records.
Parton’s visit was just one of the many ways Poss shaped MerleFest and helped it align with Watson’s vision of “traditional plus” music, Townes said. Today, MerleFest showcases a kaleidoscope of genres, from bluegrass and old-time music to blues, country, zydeco, and Cajun.
Sitting in a classroom after performing at this year’s festival, Donna The Buffalo lead singer Tara Nevins recalled how Poss supported her effort to make an old-time record. Mule To Ride, which Sugar Hill released in 1999, was a passion project. Nevins had been trained as a classical violinist, but fell in love with the same music that piqued Poss’s interest decades earlier.
“He put all his faith in me, and he let me make this record, and he gave me all kinds of artistic space to do it,” Nevins said. “He didn’t even hear it until I was like mixed and ready—and he loved it.”
Nevins said she was struggling to find the right words to describe Poss. They came to her a few hours later, as she watched Krauss, Douglas, and Union Station close out MerleFest from the mainstage.
“Barry did all that out of love,” she wrote in a text message. “He was all about the magic and his vibe and direction of Sugar Hill Records did that … So much can be said and it’s hard because it’s also a feeling.”
It was exactly the kind of thing Poss would have wanted someone to say about Sugar Hill. He was a businessman to be sure, but a lover of music first. Poss followed his heart, his ears, and his instincts as he signed artists and then let them chart their own creative course.
Honoring a Friend and a Legacy
Poss was always a fixture at MerleFest, known for his big smile, big mustache, and big laugh. His absence in recent years has been deeply felt. He died a few weeks after last year’s festival, on May 13, 2025, following months of declining health. He was 79.
Douglas was touring with Krauss when he got the news. He couldn’t make the funeral—a tough reality for musicians who spend life on the road.
“Your psyche takes a hit every time you miss a child’s birth or a birthday of some dear friend, or—you know, things like this—where they’re being honored,” Douglas said, “they’re your best friend, but you can’t be there.”
“He was all about the magic and his vibe and direction of Sugar Hill Records did that … So much can be said and it’s hard because it’s also a feeling.”
Tara Nevins, Donna The Buffalo lead singer
He’d been able to visit Poss in hospice when the tour swung through Cary that April, the last measure of a 50-year friendship rooted in music. Proud and particular, Poss had been reluctant to have visitors see him so sick, but the old friends had a good afternoon swapping jokes and sharing secrets.
“He was my wingman—confidant—and I was his,” Douglas said.
Skaggs, who was playing in Texas on the day of Poss’s funeral, sent words to be read at the packed synagogue. “I can’t thank Barry enough for taking a chance on me back in 1979,” he wrote. “He saw something in me that I didn’t fully realize at the time, but that was Barry’s gift—to see what someone could become.”
Nearly a year later, Douglas was back in Durham for another show with Krauss. Before sound check, he toured the Carolina Theatre. The century-old Beaux Arts playhouse was a special place for Poss, who served on its board of directors and saw many Sugar Hill artists grace its stage.
Douglas and other friends of Poss are in the process of putting together a benefit concert at the Carolina to honor his life and the label’s legacy.
Scheduled for November 5, the event will fund an annual concert in Poss’s name with a focus on roots and acoustic music. While the list of artists has yet to be released, Douglas expects the bill will be packed with the acclaimed musicians Poss helped elevate.
Saying Goodbye at Atomic Clock
Sara Schwartz was among the former Sugar Hill employees who lifted glasses and reminisced at Atomic Clock after Poss died in 2025. The group gathered in Poss’s old office, now a dining room in the back of the brewery, like they had when the label’s long-time general manager, Bev Paul, died the year before.
Schwartz was working for Sugar Hill when Welk Music Group closed the Durham office in 2007, nine years after acquiring the label. Welk laid off most of the nine-person staff and moved operations to Nashville, ending an incredible run in the Bull City that included a dozen Grammys, nearly two dozen IBMA awards, and a long list of other honors.
Sugar Hill’s catalog has been a valuable commodity as the music industry evolved and consolidated. In 2015, Concord Music Group bought Welk and merged Sugar Hill into what had once been an industry rival, Rounder Records. Sugar Hill remains an imprint of Rounder, but has not released an album in years.
Today, Schwartz lives around the corner from the apartment where Poss launched Sugar Hill and remains deeply involved in music. She works for PineCone, a Raleigh non-profit that promotes traditional folk music and dance in North Carolina. She’s glad to see the posthumous recognition for Poss.
“I think he should be remembered as much, if not more, than anybody else who is doing that type of work,” Schwartz said. “There’s this whole thing about bluegrass music … people who are staunch and like ‘bluegrass shouldn’t change,’ and it should always have this instrumentation. The beauty of what Sugar Hill was doing was reaching past that.”
On a recent visit to Atomic Clock, Schwartz’s time at Sugar Hill came rushing back. She remembers fielding calls from Parton fans, points to the bar where the Avett Brothers once performed amongst cubicles, and recounts packing promotional shot glasses to send to frat houses ahead of a Reckless Kelly tour.
And then, of course, there’s the musical memories: Nevin’s old-time songs, the fine picking of Doc and Merle Watson, and The Gourds singing Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” over mandolin and guitar.
For Poss, it was always about the music: one eulogy described his business model as releasing albums that moved him emotionally. That credo helped him build a mountain of music that stood the test of time, or, as Parton once sang on Halos and Horns, “a little spot of heaven up on Sugar Hill.”
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