My record collection was once filled with so many great bands who formed in the 1960s and 1970s that some got short shrift. My mistake. Then, a few years ago, I finally went to see Savoy Brown for the first […]
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I went to a small Quaker boarding school in suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania, during the late 1950s. A small group of guys, mostly two years ahead of me, regularly sneaked down to Sunset Park in the southern part of the […]
We just spent the weekend at a small bluegrass festival on a field near Oakboro, North Carolina. Big Lick is the first outdoor festival in the long North Carolina season, which runs from now until the middle of October, although […]
On December 1, 1945, Earl Scruggs took the stage at the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys and history was made, as bluegrass music made its debut. Descriptions of how the audience reacted vary, but they all […]
The world of bluegrass festivals we live in is often riddled with nostalgia for a past that may never have existed. Its adherents, with no irony at all, continue to believe that Andy Taylor and his son Opie represent the world […]
It wasn’t the weather for hitchhiking, but that didn’t stop Peter Rowan, one cold winter night in the early 1960s. “I hitchhiked from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York — way upstate — all the way down to Washington, D.C., one […]
Many people think of bluegrass music and hillbilly music in the same breath. Old-time, a description often applied to string band music as it developed in the first third of the 20th century in the mountains, hills, and hollers of […]
As I write this, my wife and I are attending a wonderful bluegrass event in the hills of east Tennessee, called the Dumplin Valley Bluegrass Festival. When I walked up the hill above Dumplin Valley Farm, I could see the […]
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first multi-day bluegrass festival, held at Cantrell’s horse farm in Fincastle, Virginia, on Labor Day weekend of 1965. For three days, bluegrass fans traipsed down from New York City, Washington, D.C., Buffalo, […]
In recent months, I’ve heard from a number of folks who want to tell me how they think contemporary bluegrass music lacks the soul that was present in the work of the early bluegrass pioneers. I find myself baffled by […]
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