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IssueM Articles

Founder of the festival Ken Seaman

Colorado’s Midwinter Bluegrass Festival Celebrates 40 Years

In most of the Bluegrass world, the beginning of festival season generally happens sometime around Memorial Day. In northern Colorado, however, everyone knows that it begins over President’s Day weekend. That’s when the Midwinter Bluegrass Festival takes place. Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, once again the Midwinter Bluegrass Festival takes over a hotel in…

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Drift

When the album kicks off with a tune entitled “Case of the Mundes,” you know the music is headed into an exploration and celebration of modern banjo sounds and when the other pickers include Sierra Hull, Bryan Sutton, Mike Bub, Justin Moses, and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, you know the music is going to fly.  Just when…

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Geraldine (left to right) Cory Chubb, Josh Anderson, John Bolten, Jonathan Vocke, Sarah Larsen. // Photo by Casey Ryan Vock

On The Fringe

Bands Blurring the Lines of Bluegrass “What I really appreciate about this band is that there are not a lot of no’s creatively,” explains Geraldine’s multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Vocke. We are eating dinner, along with the rest of Geraldine, Josh Anderson (fiddle), John Bolten (guitar/ vocals), Cory Chubb (mandolin), and Sarah Larsen (bass), in Bolten’s dining…

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Daniel Flanigan at his workbench // Photo by Joseph McDonough

Token Picks

At the 2025 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) conference held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the exhibition hall featured a new vendor booth—Token Picks. I love to stroll through the exhibit hall and check out the new instruments and gear that are on display at the various booths; however, every time I passed by the Token Pick…

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Becky Buller Releases Songs That Sing Me

Songs That Sing Me, Becky Buller’s first covers album, puts a spin on the concept. Rather than simply her take on familiar favorites audiences already know by heart, she has compiled a collection of songs that have meant the most to her, songs that she says “sing me into being.” Some, in fact, have been…

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Bill Monroe in Linebaugh’s in 1973, nearly 30 years after being photographed there in 1944. Courtesy of Carl Fleischhauer.

Notes & Queries – January 2026

In the Mail: Bill Monroe Photo Revisited The 1944 photo of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, George D. Hay, and Uncle Dave Macon (as featured in the November 2025 “Notes & Queries”) elicited several responses. Eddie Page from Florida State University wrote that he had “just received my current issue of Bluegrass Unlimited…

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