In December 2009, the virtuoso guitarist Jack Rose died suddenly, aged just 38. He had risen through Philadelphia’s noise community, but left the band Pelt in 2006, cashing unemployment cheques to stay at home and perfect his tapestry of raga and ragtime, influenced by the solo guitar playing of John Fahey. “It’s like he was transmitting something,” says Chris Forsyth, a guitarist who became close to Rose before his death. Forsyth had just left New York, and his noise band Peeesseye, to pursue more lyrical forms in Philadelphia. “Jack definitely confirmed to me that what I was doing was not crazy,” he says. “The fact that I got some affirmation from him was like, OK, this is a valid direction to try.” (Forsyth’s latest album, The Rarity of Experience, bears this out.)

The current generation of American pickers share similar experiences. Steve Gunn met Rose when he was an 18-year-old ice-cream scooper, and Rose’s support was pivotal in getting him out on the road. “When he passed away, there was a moment of asking: what now?” recalls Gunn, who has just released his seventh album (his first for Matador), Eyes on the Lines. “I knew I wanted to pursue it more and harder. It was a big void that he left for a lot of us. Time to take inspiration and keep moving, keep playing as much as we could.” It was Rose who originally connected Gunn with his now-bandmate Nathan Bowles. “I feel like, when Jack died, a lot of the people in that few degrees of separation around him were starting to grow up and take their music more seriously,” says Bowles, who is releasing his third solo record, the clawhammer banjo-based Whole & Cloven, this September.

Six years later, those degrees of separation have become a web of fellow travellers recontextualising American folk music. There are pockets of physical scenes, in North Carolina’s Durham, Philadelphia, Nashville and Louisville, but these artists are mostly united by a shared spirit, rather than a concrete sound, physical tethering or even any connection to Rose: William Tyler’s rural new age, Phil Cook’s Appalachian gospel, Hiss Golden Messenger’s gilded roots, Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg’s vernacular fingerpicking, the Weather Station’s hushed abstractions, Ryley Walker’s stirring classicism.

In the late 1960s, Gram Parsons flew the flag for what he named “cosmic American music”, a vague term that offered a distinction from the “plastic dry fuck” of country rock, and reclaimed an experimental streak that traditionalist Nashville rejected. His coinage fits these musicians, away from mainstream Americana and country, where respect for history isn’t cerebral, improvisation eschews noodling, and an existentialist streak runs wild. “[Parsons’] songs are so big and unspooling, and contain a distinctly American kind of yearning – hunger for the next frontier, and for the ways in which it can remake you,” says Amanda Petrusich, the author of Do Not Sell at Any Price, about obsessive 78rpm collectors. “I think there’s a kind of searching inherent to it, and I hear that in these newer artists, too.”

Many of these artists are actually on their second lives as musicians, after starting out in experimental bands and “gradually finding a way back to more nominally traditional songwriting structures”, says Brendan Greaves, co-founder of the label Paradise of Bachelors, based in Durham, North Carolina, which is home to a lot of them. Many are also folklorists by trade – Nathan Salsburg curates the Alan Lomax archive. Petrusich identifies their taste for records by artists such as Michael Chapman, “songwriters who didn’t quite make it the first time around, but who make more sense to us now. It’s funny, because I don’t necessarily hear this music as countercultural, but that pose certainly is. It’s a deliberate turning away from the present.”

As Greaves points out, cosmic Americana is as spurious as any other genre, but this loose community values the concept of transcendence. “I love the term Americana, but I feel like, when you put the ‘cosmic’ on it, it’s about connecting psychedelic and exploratory music to traditional American roots music, which you can trace from the Grateful Dead through to Los Lobos, Wilco, Yo La Tengo and Lambchop,” says Nashville’s William Tyler, who started out playing in Lambchop and Silver Jews. “That’s definitely the way I’ve always seen my music.” He cites Alabama-born Sun Ra as a key influence, as does Steve Gunn (who loathes “Americana” and balks at being grouped under any umbrella). “He transcended reality and cultivated his own world,” says Gunn. “I would never want to compare myself to him, but I definitely take inspiration from the fact that music doesn’t have to have this direct result.”

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Megafaun’s Phil Cook moved from Wisconsin to Durham in 2005 to dive into the region’s traditional sounds. He relates to the idea of cosmic music as “participating in a vastness”, he says. “American music has become a grand old tree to consider.” (Tyler introduced Cook to Hiss Golden Messenger’s Mike Taylor, and the new neighbours were soon playing together.) “What makes something cosmic to me is when it acknowledges the darkness in ourselves and in the world without being despairing or melancholy,” says Louisville’s Joan Shelley. “Bill Callahan has a lyric that goes: ‘Is life a ride to ride? Or a story to shape and confide? A chaos neatly denied?’ I think he’s getting at it.” For Forsyth, that sensibility is “about getting over logic and into something a little more celestial or momentary, like it’s alive”.

The web of real-life connections here is complex enough to fill out its own rock family tree. Suffice to say, collaboration is key, and the generosity that Rose extended lives on. Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman performs as the Weather Station, and last year released her breakthrough third album, Loyalty, through Paradise of Bachelors. In 2012, she was invited to play her first US show at Raleigh’s Hopscotch festival. “That weekend was kind of crazy – I met all these people who would become really important in my life, and felt completely welcomed by this community,” she says. “I met Megafaun and Brendan from Paradise of Bachelors. I saw Nathan Bowles play drums. I was befriended by Mike Taylor. I became a part of a world that I would never have known about and had no idea knew about me. Looking back, I’m still struck by that moment.”

What’s the essence of this moment? Shelley wonders if exploring these “taboos, fears, desires” comes from craving solidarity during a period of technological disconnect. Despite growing up in Nashville with a Music Row songwriter for a father, Tyler found his solo voice after discovering the early 2000s “New Weird America” scene (artists such as Rose, Six Organs of Admittance and Sunburned Hand of the Man). Whereas that scene felt reclusive, he perceives an openness in his peers, and credits British festivals such as End of the Road and Green Man with exposing them to a wider audience (his latest album, Modern Country, is his second full-length for Merge).

“I think to an extent this sound has never really gone away, though it does seem to flare up in moments of political uncertainty,” says Petrusich. “It’s kind of a national stock-taking: who are we? The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002 – that timing feels significant.” Phil Cook believes that powerful music can still “cut through the bullshit. I think the era that the Grateful Dead came out of was built on artists boldly stating their existence, because everyone was forced to choose sides amid a heavy moral crisis. So it may be because it feels like a time of moral crisis, and artists are communing.” Forsyth wonders if it’s simply about getting older. “I was 36 when I moved to Philly. I was ready to breathe a little bit.”

As imprecise as this spirit is, it’s already trickling down to the next generation. “I don’t feel cosmic, nor do I feel American,” says Illinoisan 26-year-old Ryley Walker, who releases his second album Golden Sings That Have Been Sung in August. “I feel like the drunk uncle at this party. I’m kind of the generation after William, Steve, Hiss. I was a fan of theirs when I was making my early solo guitar recordings. To see them twist traditional songwriting with improvisation most certainly had an impact on what I do. The marriage of avant garde music and folk has shaped into confessional, groovy, heady, boogie guitar tunes. I’m interested to see what’s next.”