Guitars As Traveling Companions This piece brings me to thinking about my life and its relationship with guitars. I am getting ready to sail a 53’ sailboat to Bermuda and am trying to decide which of my guitars to take with me. To go weeks without playing is unthinkable and makes me twitch. A guitar has got to be on ...

Every year, at the famed Merlefest, songwriters enthusiastically via for a chance to compete for the crown as the best songwriter at the Chris Austin Songwriting contest. Now in its 27th year, the contest allows up-and-coming songwriters to perform for a panel of music industry professionals and serves to give talented songwriters exposure. In the Bluegrass category this year, Tellico’s Anya Hinkle took ...

Reine Johansson started playing guitar when he was 11 years old. As he grew, up he became involved in various bands playing various genres of music including hard rock and blues through his mid-20s. He quit the music business for a while to become an actor and do musical theater. A few years ago he picked up his guitar again ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Jeff Scroggins grew up in a very small farming town in Dibble Oklahoma, milking cows on a dairy farm. Like many teenage boys in the 70s and 80s, Jeff dabbled in rock and roll music in high school. “They found a picture of him in a Kiss cover band,” his son Tristan told me. “He played a lot of electric ...

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 ...