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Lacrosse Club Leads To Family Band

Not all bands start out the traditional way. For Don Harrison, it was his experience making documentaries for his daughter’s travel Lacrosse team that unearthed a latent interest in songwriting, which led to a full blown CD recording several years later. Don’s friend, Steve Willett, runs Crosse Over Lacrosse, a lacrosse exchange program for 13-15 year old girls with the ...

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Time To Give It A Shot

Jeff Parker has more than 30 years under his belt touring and recording bluegrass music. The Kentucky native spent eight years with the band Renfro Valley, and five years with the Lonesome River Band before joining Daily & Vincent 12 years ago. Jeff recently felt the tug to start his own project, and left Daily & Vincent this past December ...

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Tradition Through Innovation

Audie Blaylock currently resides in Auburn, Indiana but was born in Texas, and spent part of his childhood in the Cumberland Gap area of Virginia; an area rich in Appalachian traditions. In the mid-60s his family moved to Michigan for work, but they would visit family in Virginia often. So Audie grew up with a musical family exposed to the ...

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Married To The Music

Marriage is not only marrying the right partner, but also being the right partner, it’s been said. Many of the 60.8 million pairs of married couples in the United States may wonder what that means, especially for those couples whose circumstances require frequent travel. Here, three well-known professionals in the bluegrass music industry discuss precisely what that means. They reveal ...

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Music To Wolves

Stepping away from music-industry nuts and bolts this time, I plan to share some of the interesting characters we met on my recent tour in Europe. Each gig brought note-worthy characters as well as good connections for future bookings. We began in Nancy, France, near where my cousins live, and about 1.5 hours from where my mother was born and ...

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Seedlings And Soundlings

I’ve grown up around music. It was my second language spoken in my household as a child. And I learned it much as native-born children of immigrant families do – orally and aurally. I heard the sounds and the relationships. Sure, I learned to interpret pictures of chord shapes on the guitar, and scribbled out song lyrics and place the ...

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The Quixote Project

The Quixote Project, while steeped in traditional genres, looks to blur the lines of modern music from a roots music foundation. The New Jersey based collaboration was started by Jeff Selby and fueled by a revolving cast of musicians. “They have distilled multi-genre sounds of a beachfront music festival into a remarkably cohesive live set,” said Dave Fox of Music ...

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Appalachian Roots

Anya Hinkle’s (2019 Merlefest’s Chris Austin Song Contest winner) distinctive vocals set the tone for Asheville-based Appalachian roots-music band, Tellico. A native of Southwest Virginia, Anya’s native influences coupled with her worldly travels makes for a seasoned musical flavor full of honesty and heart. Both of Anya’s parents were musicians, and she grew up playing violin, singing in the church ...

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When I Rise

Cary Morin is a Crow tribal member born in Billings, Montana. Cary spent the bulk of his youth in Great Falls, where he honed his musical skills picking guitar standards at neighborhood get-togethers. He eventually moved to Northern Colorado in 1989 where his professional musical career hit the ground running. Cary’s first big break came with the internationally acclaimed band, ...

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It’s In My DNA

Singer/songwriter Artie Tobia makes his home in New York, and comes from a deep pedigree of music. “My great, great grandfather played with John Philip Sousa. I had grandfathers and uncles and cousins who all had careers in music. So I got the gene and/or that bug,” he told us. Artie said he remembers writing his first song at around ...

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