James King was a man with great musical talent and a voracious appetite for life. Those two things fed each other and helped him to emerge from the picker’s field to become one of the most popular and beloved bluegrass singers, from […]
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My wife and I have been traveling to bluegrass festivals up and down the East Coast, with occasional forays into the Midwest, for about a dozen years now. As we’ve come to know and value increasing numbers of musicians, there’s one […]
The Steep Canyon Rangers have established themselves as one of the premier bluegrass bands in the nation while forging into realms — and venues — that could not even be imagined in 1945 when bluegrass emerged on the Grand Ole […]
Several years ago at Strawberry Park — a bluegrass festival in a commercial campground near New London, Connecticut, about halfway between New York City and Boston — I went to the workshop tent to hear Kimber Ludiker. She’s that marvelous fiddler and founder […]
Sylva, North Carolina, lies just short of 50 miles southwest of Asheville, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the western part of the state. It’s a small town of around 2,500 people, the seat of Jackson County. It’s the […]
I went to a small Quaker boarding school in suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania, during the late 1950s. A small group of guys, mostly two years ahead of me, regularly sneaked down to Sunset Park in the southern part of the […]
We just spent the weekend at a small bluegrass festival on a field near Oakboro, North Carolina. Big Lick is the first outdoor festival in the long North Carolina season, which runs from now until the middle of October, although […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Myth: Bluegrass music grew organically from the hills and hollers of Appalachia. It is the province of the rural South, where people grew up listening to it, picked up instruments that happened to be lying around the house, and began […]
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