We’re at the Jenny Brook Bluegrass Festival in Tunbridge, VT, this weekend. Located in the hills of central Vermont, east of the Green Mountain National Forest and west of the Connecticut River that divides Vermont and New Hampshire, the Tunbridge […]
I keep hearing all the cries that music is being degraded. Country music isn’t “real” anymore. Bluegrass is being ruined, even insulted, by thrashers, copiers, and those unwilling to pay their dues. Rock and roll isn’t played anymore, having been […]
Eddie Huffman’s John Prine: In Spite of Himeself (University of Texas Press, March 2015, $24.96/13.99, 224 pages) from the American Music Series effectively explores the music and life of Americana icon John Prine in an admiring, but not uncritical unauthorized […]
My wife and I came to know Kelley Gibson, bit by bit, through his father Eric Gibson, who happens to be the older half of The Gibson Brothers, one of the premier bands in bluegrass. Kelley is 19 years old. […]
Jean Ritchie died a few days ago at the age of 92. For decades, her pure, clear voice brought the sounds and sentiments of Appalachian music to people from Carnegie Hall to A Prairie Home Companion. She played and sang […]
Last week I wrote a column I called “It’s Not All about the Music.” My wife, Irene, has taken some exception to that. For her, what comes from the stage at a bluegrass festival is “all about the music.” I […]
The stage is often small – an open front shed with room on the stage for five microphones, monitors, and a few lights, almost enough to allow members of the audience to recognize who’s onstage. Members of the band form […]
I noticed as I was writing a preview for the Strawberry Park Bluegrass Festival, which we’re going to attend in Connecticut in two weeks, that their Friday lineup features four bands who are fronted by and/or dominated by women. Furthermore, […]
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 […]
We’re at HoustonFest in fabled Galax, VA, this weekend. Galax is the home of the annual Old Fiddler’s Convention, which has been held since 1935. Located along the Crooked Road in Southwest Virginia, bluegrass and old-time musicians make the pilgrimage […]
