Reviews

It’s always exciting when an eminently talented newcomer like Ellis emerges on the scene.  This East Tennessee mandolin prodigy wrote these instrumental tunes when he was just twelve years old and recorded them only a year or so later.  As a reference point, he picked up the instrument at age ten and not long afterward…

You could call Kyle Tuttle, longtime member of Molly Tuttle’s band Golden Highway, the Jimi Hendrix of the banjo. On his second album of mostly original songs (based on what he describes in the accompanying press material “the ups and downs of love and loss [and] … some very high times and some very low…

Chris Eaton’s solo release D for Dobro is a collection of nine solo instrumentals in Open D tuning and is a follow-up to the collaborative recording he released last year The UK & Ireland Dobro Celebration.  He stated that, “There’s not very much repertoire for Open D lapsteel, certainly not many solo unaccompanied arrangements.” So,…

This new project is a continuation of the Tribute Band created in 2005 by Bill Yates, former Gentlemen bass player. The band at that time consisted of Yates, Mike Phipps, Darren Beachley and David Propst. This group produced an album in 2006 and toured around the mid-Atlantic area until Yates’s passing in 2015.  Now this…

Willie Carlisle is a troubadour following in the footsteps of folks like Woody Gutherie, John Prine, Rambling Jack Elliot and Utah Phillips. On his latest release he teams up Grammy-nominated musician and producer Darrell Scott for a well-crafted album full of songs about love and redemption. Carlisle explores what it means to be human as…

The story of Tony Trischka’s Earl Scruggs tribute album sounds like the makings of a song itself.  During the pandemic, the banjo virtuoso received a package in the mail that contained a thumb drive. This wasn’t one with old photos or spreadsheets — it was recordings of Scruggs and John Hartford jamming, mostly made at…