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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

During the summer festival season, we find it difficult to attend more than a few of the fine Americana music performances that the great promoters of this genre of music make available. The solution of course is to locate a source of this music that does not end when the leaves began to change color. One really great fall/winter source ...

Gregg Welty’s initial exposure to bluegrass music is like so many other musicians growing up in musical families. “I remember listening to my dad (the 1993 Winfield national bluegrass banjo champion) play music throughout childhood,” Gregg told me recently. “I really hated the Banjo for the majority of my childhood. When I was in middle school/early high school, I decided ...

As musicians, we have all spent time playing with other musicians as a band member or the lead. The adage that wrangling band members is like herding cats can definitely be true. Ultimately it comes down to attitude, and a good attitude always pays off. Following are a few examples of experiences I have had. I am hoping that if ...