LEXINGTON, Ky. -- After two decades of bridging the acoustic backbone of bluegrass with the grit and drive of soul-infused blues, The SteelDrivers are ... um, what’s that trendy word to suggest when one’s popularity is spiking?

“Trending,” offered band co-founder, fiddler, co-vocalist and songwriter Tammy Rogers. “As the kids say today, we’re trending. After 20 years, we’re trending upward.”

That’s a curious term when affixed to the music of this Grammy-winning musical hybrid. In actuality, the music it has created over two decades, seven albums and four lead singers found a solid following early on.

Gathered together by guitarist Mike Henderson, a Missouri-born artist with a strong affinity for blues and roots music inspirations, the band quickly fused the Southern-leaning singing of a then-unknown Chris Stapleton with bluegrass instrumentation.

It was with the second SteelDrivers vocalist, Gary Nichols, that the band went South in a way that defies the common nosediving use of the term. With Jason Isbell sitting in and producing two tracks, The SteelDrivers’ third album, “The Muscle Shoals Recordings,” won a Grammy in 2016.

Oh, and did we mention Adele cut one of the band’s songs? So, yeah, you could say the kids got this one right.

The SteelDrivers at 20 have been trending for some time.

“I don’t think that you can really plan a thing like a 20th anniversary,” Rogers said. “We’ve had some amazing things happen through the history of the band. You can’t hire a publicist to make those things happen. You can’t hire a manager. Certainly, it’s great to have a good team, but something like Adele covering one of our songs? That was huge. That kind of stuff ... it’s just serendipitous.”

By now it’s an old story, but one very much worth repeating.

British pop empress Adele was taken enough with “If It Hadn’t Been for Love,” a blues-soul lament Henderson and Stapleton wrote for The SteelDrivers’ self-titled 2008 album, that she recorded the tune and included it a bonus track on import editions of her double Grammy-winning 2011 sophomore recording “21.”

The legend is that Adele was on a tour bus in 2008 or 2009, Rogers said, and her bus driver played the song.

“I’ve seen clips of her introducing the song and she would always give us props,” Rogers said. “She would say, ‘This is a song by The SteelDrivers, an American swagger band.’ And people would go look us up from there. It widened up our audience just an incredible amount.”

“Basically, our music has been niche music all these years,” Rogers continued. “Bluegrass is not played very much on commercial radio and, until recent years with streaming, it’s been kind of hard to find. So the fact that she got a hold of that CD from her bus driver? I mean, you can’t make that stuff up.”

Though Stapleton left the band in 2010 after the release of its second album, “Reckless,” discussing his tenure was pretty much unavoidable given how The SteelDrivers will be back on the country star’s home turf this weekend for a two-night engagement at the Lexington Opera House.

Stapleton was 27 when he was in the band, and hadn’t yet shot to the stardom he has today.

“When he was running around with us in the back of a Ford Econoline, he was just a regular guy,” Rogers said. “We were all just like family, running around, having a ball of fun telling hilarious stories.”

Rogers and Stapleton still have inside jokes based on their time in the band together.

“I ran into Chris a couple of years back and told him, ‘Well, have a health drink.’ And he knew exactly what I was talking about,” Rogers said. “He started laughing and said, “I absolutely will.’”

A health drink?

“That was our term for cranberry and vodka. Hey, cranberry’s good for you. It’s a health drink,” she said.

But the alumnus that holds a perhaps greater position in terms of stewardship and influence for Rogers and her bandmates is Henderson.

The guitarist — who primarily played mandolin with The SteelDrivers — left the band roughly a year after Stapleton, but continued to write with his former bandmate after the latter’s solo career skyrocketed. The SteelDrivers’ Opera House run falls almost two years to the day from when Henderson’s died unexpectedly at age 70.

“As I have been quoted many times in saying, this is all Mike’s fault,” Rogers said of Henderson’s piloting of The SteelDrivers’ formation. “He’s the guy who called all of us together in the very beginning. He had been writing with Chris for three or four years at that point. I remember the day I got the phone call from Mike.”

Henderson asked if Rogers wanted to “play a little bluegrass.” He had also called together Richard Bailey and Mike Fleming, The SteelDrivers’ banjoist and bassist, respectively, who have been in the band with Rogers since the beginning.

“Mike’s the one that cast everybody from the very beginning. I don’t think you can understate his role,” Rogers said.

Fast forward to today and a 20th anniversary marked by the release of “Outrun,” which is as solid a representation of The SteelDrivers’ soul-soaked bluegrass sound as any recording it has made. The work also represents the second album with the band’s fourth and newest lead vocalist, Matt Dame. He took over following the departure of yet another Kentucky-born singer, Berea native Kelvin Damrell, in 2021.

“Honestly, though, every change we’ve experienced has brought a new energy to the group because there is suddenly a little different twist on things, maybe a little bit different phrasing on this song or that song,” Rogers said. “It’s an interesting dynamic, though, between letting everybody have their own individual voice — you know, bringing what they bring to the table — and the overriding idea of the band’s musical direction.

“That has never really changed. There’s still that bluesy, driving, edgy, almost rock ‘n’ roll sensibility.”

Underscoring a heritage of rock ‘n’ roll reflected on “Outrun” more in sentiment and soul than in any kind of electric amplification is the fact that it was released by the recently reactivated Sun Records, the label that gave rise to the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Now that’s what you call trending.

“Hey, we’re now labelmates with Elvis,” Rogers said. “How about that?”

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If you go: The SteelDrivers and Sam Lewis

When: 8 p.m. Sept. 19 -20

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short

Tickets:$50.95- $61.50

Online: ticketmaster.com

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