Thomas Goldsmith opens his biographical portrait of Earl Scruggs and his greatest artistic achievement, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” by setting the scene in both Scruggs’ early childhood home of Flint Hill, North Carolina, and the Herzog recording studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, […]
Having recently watched BBC’s Lost Highway: the Story of Country Music has me yearning to see the PBS broadcast of Big Family: The Story of Bluegrass Music over Labor Day weekend, and Ken Burns’ eight-part PBS documentary Country Music to […]
Podcasts have evolved into a focused format aimed at committed enthusiasts with time to listen, think, and explore the world of their music, offering more information and insight about the music than just recordings played for you to hear. For […]
New bluegrass bands emerge all the time. The routine goes right back to the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland fantasy movies — “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” — or the garage rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s. As with […]
What’s the attraction of attending a bluegrass festival, or any other kind of music festival? During the now nearly 20 years that my wife and I have participated in the world of bluegrass, we’ve attended house concerts, indoor events, small […]
Bluegrass music has a long and lively history in Florida, where we’re coming close to the end of another winter festival season. While many people who come to the Sunshine State love to cluster along the Atlantic or Gulf shores, […]
Balsam Range is just an adolescent, in bluegrass terms. As it enters its 12th year of touring, the band, whose five members all come from rural Haywood County in western North Carolina, has established itself as a groundbreaking bluegrass band […]
One of the criteria for excellence in bluegrass music is maintaining tradition while expressing it in new ways. Are these changes merely the changes of fashion, putting new covers on the same unchanging framework? Or are they organic, coming from […]
A few weeks ago my wife and I journeyed the 1,000 miles down to King’s Mountain, North Carolina, to attend the seventh annual Darin & Brooke Aldridge Holiday Concert at the Joy Performance Center there. We attended both the afternoon […]
Houston Caldwell was a talented young musician who lived in Galax, Virginia, a hotbed of traditional old-time and bluegrass music, where the annual Galax Old Fiddlers Convention has been held each year since 1935. Houston had recently graduated from high […]
