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 […]
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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 […]
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. […]
Herb Pedersen just finished an exciting tour playing with Tom Petty and Mudcrutch. Yet, I wonder how many Mudcrutch fans at those incredible full-blown rock shows now remember the name of the talented backup singer, acoustic guitarist and banjoist who […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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