Reviews

[Editor’s Note: We ran this review in the September 2025, however, there were some inaccuracies in that review.  Because of those inaccuracies, I decided to run the review again with corrections included.  Our apologies to Volume Five for the previous inaccurate review.] Mississippi fiddle player Glen Harrell founded Volume Five in 2008, originally as a…

Ever since Earl Scruggs stepped on stage with Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys in December of 1945, banjo players have been interested in learning how to play the five-string banjo like Earl.  Early banjo players slowed down recordings and went to watch Earl play in order to figure out how he was executing those…

In 2015, Seth Mulder and some friends began playing at the local Ole Smokey Moonshine Distillery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The group based their music on traditional bluegrass with a more modern approach, and by 2018, Seth and Midnight Run band became official. Since then, the band has gained in popularity, and they have been busy…

The Bay Ramblers were a San Fransisco Bay Area bluegrass band that performed for a couple of years in the mid-1980s at venues like Paul’s Saloon and the Grass Valley Bluegrass Festival.  Some of the shows at those two venues were recorded live, and Sandy Rothman, who was the banjo player in the band, has…

Ben Garnett is best known in bluegrass circles as the longtime guitarist with Missy Raines and Allegheny. But he’s also a rising star on the new acoustic music scene. It was while majoring in jazz guitar performance at North Texas University that Garnett discovered artists such as Tony Rice, the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and…

In their time, The Country Gentlemen were one of the most influential groups in bluegrass. From their founding in 1957, over the next several decades, they recorded dozens of albums as key members came and went. The Gentlemen were among the first to broadly expand bluegrass’s vocabulary by bringing in material from other genres. In…