Bluegrass music spent about four decades doing its best to try to establish a unique genre fully separated from country music. The origin came, as this column has often pointed out, on Dec. 8, 1945, with the addition of Earl […]
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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 […]
Most bluegrass bands never progress beyond playing gigs in retirement centers, local orchards, and their best friends’ weddings, where they often work for free. Some become a bit better known, working for modest appearance fees at local and regional festivals, […]
People with special talents rarely, if ever, develop in a vacuum. Mozart’s father was an accomplished pianist who recognized a rare talent for composition and performance in his young son. He appears to have been something of a slave driver […]
Lots of people I know casually, or even personally, people who are either my virtual or actual friends and acquaintances, seem to be going to something called SXSW that’s happening in Austin, Texas, this week. “Is this extravaganza something for me?” […]
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 […]
When I was a child growing up in an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side during the 1940s, I remember going down to the forbidden boiler room, where a huge furnace sat burning coal. Rosie, the building’s superintendent, opened […]
Virginia has long been considered one of the central nests that hatched bluegrass and country music onto the American music scene and nurtured its growth from the earliest days of recorded music and live professional performance. The list of performers, […]
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 […]
Bluegrass emerged out of a bubbling world of country music that was changing from a simply regional music in the 1920s into what became known as Country & Western and was sold to the world as appealing to a strong, but […]
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