Memory is a strange and wonderful artifact. When I was a teacher, students who were seniors referred to school habits as traditions, though much of what they referred to this way had just been initiated when they were in middle school. Family […]
A friend of mine has been in bluegrass for 40 years. He’s a protector of bluegrass tradition and a road warrior who’s still standing, singing, touring with his band after all these years. When we see each other at festivals, we […]
Last week, I was shocked and deeply disappointed to read — first in a Facebook post, then in Bluegrass Today — the daily online news source for the bluegrass community, that WAMU’s BluegrassCountry.org, would be leaving us on Dec. 31 unless a new owner […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just about 70 years ago today, December 8, 1945, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs first stepped on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, and a storm erupted. For years, Bill Monroe had been […]
One of the locations where bluegrass music originated can be found in the area just west of Charlotte, North Carolina, in Gaston and Cleveland counties. Earl Scruggs was born there, near Shelby, the county seat of Cleveland County, which I’m […]
Earl Scruggs has long been lauded for the tone, taste, and timing of his banjo playing, and those same measures have been applied to bluegrass music as a whole. When bands exhibit strengths in developing and maintaining a tone, playing […]
In the beginning, it was all country. The truth and the myth came together on the front porches and parlors as well as at the small village churches, stores with cracker barrels, corner bars, and honky-tonks … all the places […]
