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 […]
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Bluegrass is wrongfully stereotyped as a traditional music with more than a little hayseed in its ears. Perhaps this stereotype grows out of its early emergence from its own source material, which was then emphasized by its use in television […]
A bluegrass festival represents a very special kind of community-building each time it occurs. My wife and I just spent five days, including the attendant elements of getting to, participating in, and departing for another year, at one such event. […]
The Gibson Brothers’ new recording, In the Ground from Rounder Records, stands out for its musicality, meaningfulness, and structure. Like a sophisticated classical song cycle, each song stands alone, but as a part of the greater whole each encompasses the Gibson Brothers’ lives and […]
As my wife and I have traveled over the last 15 years, during what some would call our retirement, we’ve experienced bluegrass music as what I thought to be a national music phenomenon. Recently, I read a book called Bluegrass […]
For the third year in a row we journeyed into the North Country, that massive swath of barren rural land crossing New England and Upstate New York whose distinctive culture and accents are a recognized cultural artifact. We braved threatening […]
Last weekend we attended the Pemi Valley Bluegrass Festival, held in a huge campground in Thornton, New Hampshire. The facility provides a few electric sites for those who need or wish them, a standpipe of potable water, no-sewer sites, and […]
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 […]
This afternoon we started our trek north from Florida, heading into the blooming outdoor bluegrass season, which runs from April through October in most of the country. I’ve been writing this column for a year now, writing about all the festivals I’ve […]
Many bluegrass pickers — both good amateurs and professionals — really did learn to play on the back porch, whether it’s a symbolic back porch or a real one. Tut Taylor, the late, great flatpicking Dobro man, learned his unique […]
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