News/Thoughts

Featured Articles

Front Porch Roots School

We are believers in live music and are cheerleaders for the venues in which live music is taught and performed. And we believe that local encouragement of live musical engagement is vitally important. We recently began seeing posts on our social media outlets regarding activities at a music school and performance venue in nearby Charlottesville, VA named The Front Porch. ...

Read More »

Covered In Style

A few years ago my wife and I made our annual trek to MerleFest, where thousands gather every April for this premier music event. As you might imagine, like any outdoor festival, you’re either in a camp chair or spread out on the ground. And as often happens in April, there are rain showers, which leave the ground constantly damp. ...

Read More »

Bill Collings; On Making Guitars

My road to Collings guitars started about 15 years ago when the then product manager at Takamine guitars (Mike Markure) took me to the Collings booth at winter NAMM and introduced me to Collings’ GM, Steve McCreary. Over the years I would see Steve once a year at NAMM and walk away stunned by his soft-spoken passion for the instruments ...

Read More »

Beyond Appalachian Music

Sometimes we lovers of Americana string music and its associated entertaining pleasures do not take the listening, watching, feeling, tasting leap very far beyond our Appalachian roots. However, there are some more great Americana experiences waiting for us out there. Information about two such experiences recently found their way to our desk. Let me tell you about them. The Academy ...

Read More »

Pickin’ With Jenny

A plectrum can be a thin flat piece of slightly flexible material held by or worn on the fingers and used to pluck or strum stringed musical instruments The plectrum is often called a pick or flat pick if used by a player to produce individual notes. Players of string-music know that there are many types of picks that will ...

Read More »

Best Fest In Parson’s

In 2004, John and Joyce Bowers decided to host a little one day Bluegrass festival on the property of their recently developed campground. Little could they imagine that 13 years later they would win the IBMA award for Best Bluegrass Event of the year in 2017. John and Joyce enjoyed attending the Music in the Mountains festival, and on one ...

Read More »

Without Riddle, Where Would The Music Be?

When the poet said, “No man is an island,” I believe he meant that while our efforts lead to our successes in life, those successes are attained with the help of others. Recently this fact was brought home to us with the hearing of a story that took place during the early days of recorded country music. With that tease, ...

Read More »

Birth Of Country Music

Recently, we here at the magazine became aware of a press release from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). This press release announced the up-coming airing of a new Ken Burns documentary film titled Country Music. This new film consists of eight two-hour episodes and will air on PBS stations this fall. According to the PBS press release, the film Country ...

Read More »

Five Pounds Of Possum

Tim White is one of East Tennessee’s most prominent bluegrass musicians and broadcast personalities, and he is celebrating the 25th anniversary of one of his early albums titled, The Possum Tapes, by releasing a new music video for one of the songs on the album titled, Five Pounds of Possum. Tim wrote the song, Five Pounds of Possum as a ...

Read More »

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 ...

Read More »