The Archives

Fifty years ago bluegrass music was roughly 25 years old and hitting its full stride.  Multi-day bluegrass festivals were gaining in popularity around the country, the first-generation bands were still performing and in their prime, and the second-generation bands were developing strong reputations.  During 1971, Tony Rice joined J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson joined the Country…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine June 1972, Volume 6, Number 12 The place looks like a composite of all those little Nashville recording studios you read about in Look or Newsweek, once a garage or spare bedroom and now a down home hit factory where the new sound of today’s country music is put down….

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1971, Volume 5, Number 11 Part I: THE CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS This is about Curly Ray Cline, Roy Lee Centers, Jack Cooke, and maybe me. Over the last twenty-five years there have been many Clinch Mt. Boys, but this is the present band and thus representative of the Stanley…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1971, Volume 6, Number 2 About the Cover: Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt were reunited on the stage of Bean Blossom, Indiana this year, as a climax to the largest bluegrass festival ever held. It had been twenty-three years since Lester Flatt had left the Blue Grass Boys to…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1974, Volume 8, Number 11 “I never was much of a believer in astrology until last winter, when I read horoscope and it said I was going to have a good spring. Well, now it’s spring, and things are going so good, I guess there’s something to be said…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited MagazineMay 1974, Volume 8, Number 11 In the early years of bluegrass, a large number of combinations rather quickly took up the style being popularized by Bill Monroe and his band. While it is true that most of the elements of the bluegrass style had been around for several years and…