When you share a birthday with the great Earl Scruggs, and grow up in the mountains of East Tennessee, destiny may well be written in the stars. That’s the case with Johnson County’s Kody Norris, celebrating the 10th anniversary of […]
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This question popped up on my Facebook feed on Monday morning: “In your opinion, is bluegrass music on the decline, or it it growing? And what will it be like in 20 years??” The writer, in his explanation, went on […]
Somewhere last night, a child was born while his dad was at a gig. A wife worried at home, anxious about her husband on the road. A teenage boy looked into the stands to see if his father had managed to […]
Fans of Earl Scruggs frequently hold that when he broke with Lester Flatt, his musical partner of 24 years, to form the Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons, he actually was only caving in to his desire to please his sons, […]
I have been thinking a lot about John Hartford lately. And the banjo. About how one of the most popular songs of the 20th century (“Gentle on My Mind”) was written on the banjo, and its journey to prominence today […]
Earl Scruggs: Banjo Icon by Gordon Castelnero and David L. Russell (Rowman & Littlefield) uses an oral history approach to produce a volume both scholarly and readable. With the full cooperation of the Scruggs family, they conducted 72 interviews with family […]
Any Bob Dylan fans out there? Yeah? Maybe just a few? Then you probably already know that his latest album is coming out this Friday. Triplicate is a three-disc monster of songs by American songwriters who aren’t Bob Dylan. You […]
Last weekend we attended our first Florida bluegrass festival of the season. The YeeHaw Music Fest, approaching its 25th anniversary as a festival next year, has a noble history. Like many festivals, it owes more to fandom than professional polish. […]
Robbie Fulks calls his music “country or maybe folk,” but that description would have been too simple back in 1997 when the Chicago Tribune raved about his then-new album. “Robbie Fulks is hotter than a Gatling gun!” the newspaper’s music […]
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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