The Tradition

For over half a century, old-time/bluegrass music has connected the author with a wide variety of interesting and highly talented people, including autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, musicians in New Zealand, and Virginians transplanted to Detroit. The following is a selective appreciation. On the Fourth of July weekend in 1971, I attended Carlton Haney’s bluegrass festival…

Photo by Jamie Alexander “JT was a big wheel in the business,” said the award-winning songwriter and bluegrass musician Larry Cordle just days after the death of the Station Inn’s JT Gray on March 20th, 2021. “This is what blows my mind about him losing his life. I mean, he just got his due. He…

“In a dreary Yankee prison where a rebel soldier lay.”  That is the opening line to the Charlie Moore classic “The Legend Of The Rebel Soldier,” which Moore had recorded on his 1974 Old Homestead release, The Fiddler. But it was the Country Gentlemen’s cover of the song a year earlier on their 1973 Rebel…

Joe Mullins began to recognize the power of music to bridge traditions and create new communities while listening to his father Paul “Moon” Mullins, a radio broadcaster and accomplished fiddle player from Kentucky. Like so many people, the Mullins family found themselves in the Dayton/Cincinnati, Ohio area as a result of the great Appalachian out-migration…

This is an excerpt from Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy (edited by Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, © 2021 by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.). The book chronicles the important roles Cincinnati, Dayton and surrounding areas played in the development of…

Bluegrass has been beset with the recent passing of a number talented members of our community. In lieu of our regular “Notes and Queries” column, we use the space this month to honor their memories. Wayne Wendell Daniel February 14, 1929 – February 16, 2021 Wayne Wendell Daniel was a prolific author who specialized in…