Jay Farrar

As a founding member of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, songwriter Jay Farrar helped popularize the alt-country movement of the 1990s. He also launched a solo career during the following decade, making it plain that his musical ambitions stretched far beyond the retro-leaning twang of his contemporaries. Farrar was born and raised in Belleville, Illinois, a small town not far from the Illinois/Missouri border. He was 12 when he first began leaning to play the guitar, and in high school he made friends with a fellow musically inclined student named Jeff Tweedy. Farrar and Tweedy f...