Americana Music Magazine – Bluegrass, Roots, Folk, Blues, and Old-Time

The International Bluegrass Music Association will celebrate the 30th anniversary of it’s annual awards this September (24th – 28th) in Raleigh, NC, at it’s annual conference and music festival. Del McCoury, who is celebrating his 80th birthday will co-host the event with famed music songwriter, Jim Lauderdale. “What could be better than Del co-hosting the Awards Show with the legendary ...

It is mid-summer and I am on the road from Norfolk, Virginia to Annapolis, Maryland thinking of the upcoming festivals I will be playing later this summer and fall. They are all quite different. The best ones create a fest-family of artists that then grows to include the audience. As a veteran of performing at festivals, and producing a music ...

I don’t remember how or when I first heard of Under the Big Sky Festival, which took place for the first time last weekend in remote Whitefish, Montana (just outside the gates of the epic Glacier National Park). It must have come across my social media since I follow a few of the acts on the bill. In the dreary ...

If you can compose a written sentence in a grammatically accepted manner that conveys a coherent thought to a reader who finds that thought interesting, you are a writer—NO! To be a writer, one must modify those words with others so that the whole word grouping provokes emotional feelings in the reader’s mind. When done properly, a story emerges. Story ...

If you are a fan of Alice Gerrard who, along with her duet partner the legendary folksinger, Hazel Dickens, pioneered the emergence of women in bluegrass, you might be interested in this bit of information. Several years ago at the IBMA convention in Raleigh, NC, the AR trade booth was located near an exhibit explaining a film producer’s effort to ...

Natalya Zoe Weinstein is a multi-instrumentalist and an award-winning songwriter. Together with vocalist, John Cloyd Miller, they make up the string duo of Zoe & Cloyd. Founding members of the trio Red June, the pair have been touring as a duo since 2015. They met in Ashville, NC hanging around the local music scene there in 2005. Red June lasted ...

Scottish brothers Charlie and Stirling Gorman live in a little village near Glasgow. As kids, they played in various bands and dreamed of one day making it big and finding a way out and into the big music world as stars. Then, one day in 1994 it happened. Their band, Murmur, caught the attention of a record executive. The next ...

When Bobby Messano was 14, he was already playing guitar in clubs with guys that were in their 20s. “I wanted to be Eric Clapton and I wanted to play the Philmore East,” he recalled. “I never got to do either,” he laughed. But Bobby has been able to accomplish a few things in his legendary career as a guitarist. ...

Jim Stephen’s Yellow River album release is his 4th in 36 months on Ropeadope Records. It’s a 10 song “tour-de-force” featuring music rooted deep in Jazz, Soul, Blues, and Funk. It was recorded mostly in two days at the legendary Esplanade Studios in New Orleans where Jim calls home. Jim got a late start in music, not really playing or ...

At present, Gina Furtado is most known for her banjo work with Chris Jones and the Night Drivers. That’s all about to change as she sets out this summer on a solo career with her own band. She’s as innovative with her songwriting as she is with her banjo playing. She released her debut album, True Colors, in September 2017, ...