“What was born in Kentucky / is living in Raleigh now.” — Chatham County Line With eight stages and over 100 performing artists, this year’s International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass festivities, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, last week […]
Last weekend, Barbara Martin Stephens, at age 83 an energetic, warm, articulate woman, came to the Sertoma Bluegrass Festival in Florida to tell the story of her life with “The King of Bluegrass,” Jimmy Martin. Her book, Don’t Give Your […]
Some years ago, a leader of a national band hired a new lead singer, whose voice, energy, and personality soon helped to raise the band’s profile. After a while, the band was developing a larger audience while booking better and […]
As my wife and I have traveled over the last 15 years, during what some would call our retirement, we’ve experienced bluegrass music as what I thought to be a national music phenomenon. Recently, I read a book called Bluegrass […]
Last weekend, we attended a well-established festival near Palatka, Florida, where we’ve been coming since 2006. It’s promoted by Norman Adams, who books and operates nine prominent and mostly traditional bluegrass festivals up and down the East Coast. He’s careful […]
Genius has within it the seeds of its own destruction. Bill Monroe labored for years to find and develop a musical sound he heard in his head. He experimented throughout his sojourn in the industrial necklace around the Great Lakes […]
“The forerunner of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver” is how bluegrass giant Lawson once described this album, released in 1977 while he was still a member of the Country Gentlemen. From the influential mandolinist’s own career perspective, that’s true enough — […]
