The banjo has been seen as the characteristic instrument of bluegrass music. For 70 years, it wasn’t bluegrass unless it featured a banjo. Many suggest that’s still true, that bluegrass has lost its way when it plugs in, uses other […]
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I never thought big could be beautiful when it came to Americana festival crowds. I’ve changed my mind after seeing the bright lights of Bristol, TN/VA and its 50,000-plus. Or maybe I’m just infatuated with festivals themselves. Perhaps, if I […]
There has been a proliferation of music festivals, largely with an emphasis on rootsy music over the past decade or so, especially here in Virginia, from my wife’s and my favorite, the somewhat recent addition to the scene, the Red […]
After describing RockyGrass as the perfect festival last year, I actually need to amend that sentiment. There is no such thing as perfection, yet many of us constantly strive for it. I would say it is more like a Three Michelin […]
Located in Boston, Massachusetts — that bastion of Northeastern probity, where the “the Cabots speak only to Lodges, and the Lodges speak only to God” — Berklee College of Music is a hotbed of musical revolution and change more reminiscent of the […]
Whenever two icons decide to tour, the end result is usually greatness. Thus, on a warm spring evening in Nashville, Chick Corea and Bela Fleck took the stage at the Ryman Auditorium and put on an otherworldly show. Taking mostly from their […]
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 […]
One early Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, Irene and I found ourselves driving north through Florida’s midlands, heading from a bluegrass festival to a state park near Orlando where we enjoy the quiet, the terrain, and the change […]
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 […]
Special to the Wheeling Daily Register, Jan. 20, 1894: WILD E, W. Va., January 19. – John Hardy, for killing Thomas Drews, both colored, was hung at 2:09 p.m. to-day. Three thousand people witnessed his death. His neck was broken and […]
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