Reviews

Georgia-based John White is an accomplished banjo player as well as a student of the instrument’s history. In the past, he’s recorded with gourd banjos, fretless banjos and Victorian banjos. On this solid collection of original songs, White has teamed up with some front-line pickers: Tim Crouch on fiddle, Tony Wray on guitar, Randy Kohrs…

Patuxent Music The McPeak Brothers, out of Wytheville, VA, had a significant impact on bluegrass music during their run from the early 1960s right through to the 1990s, mainly due to their fine vocal arrangements and distinct songwriting.  Along the way, they recorded for Rebel Records, County Records and RCA/Nashville. They were also featured on…

Mountain Home Sometimes compilations can be kind of … meh. They can often be a random sampler without much cohesion.  Sometimes they turn out to be a historic record, especially when grouped around a theme or instrument, like Masters of Slide: The Spider Sessions, a resonator guitar collection put together by beloved Dobroman Phil Leadbetter….

Mel Bay Publications There are relatively few books on the market today that teach you how to play the upright bass in the context of bluegrass music, so Nate Sabat’s new book Dirt Simple Upright Bass is a very welcome addition to the world of bluegrass instructional material.   In this 46-page book, which also…

It’s no empty figure of speech to say this Canadian mandolin/mandola master’s debut album was nearly two decades in the making. Maybe you could call it perseverance, or maybe you can call it procrastination, or maybe you could call it both. But in his liner notes, McNulty, who spent 40 years as a journalist, explains…

Boar Hog Bluegrass 3408 Bluegrass icon Jack Tottle has a ton of stories to tell, I’m sure. Here, he unfurls a bounty of wonderful, inventive original instrumentals and other tunes to let those stories shine. Buoyed by the floational flatpicking guitar of Tim Stafford, Tottle presents 13 original and traditional tunes here in a mostly…