The Venue

Introducing Billy Strings as the keynote speaker for the IBMA World of Bluegrass, Executive Director Ken White called him a “generational talent” and acknowledged the kind of “watershed moment” that comes along every twenty years or so, putting “bluegrass music in the center of popular culture.” Along with such phenomena as Will the Circle Be…

There is a sound that belongs to Raleigh each fall. It rises from downtown streets and echoes between brick buildings. It carries the bright ring of mandolins, the warmth of fiddles, and the rhythm of a hundred tapping feet. It is the sound of bluegrass, and it is the sound of Raleigh Wide Open. Every…

Iowa’s Oldest and Largest Bluegrass Festival In Northeast Iowa, around 4 miles south of a small town called Strawberry Point (home of the World’s Largest Strawberry) and a few miles north of Backbone State Park, lies a picturesque 20-acre wooded site. During the last full weekend of July, this beautiful location is full of campers…

IBMA’s 2025 Event of the Year Winners Written By Dale and Darcy Cahill Being lifelong lovers of bluegrass and thirty-year veterans of attending bluegrass festivals in New England: Grey Fox, Thomas Point, Podunk, and many others, we have never attended a festival in the southern states. When we saw the Earl Scruggs Music Festival lineup…

Photos Courtesy of Alisa Murphy People describing the Station Inn, Nashville’s iconic music venue, use such words as home and family. Some call it magic. An Ohio couple who retired to Nashville for the music and who regularly attend the Sunday jams and Monday shows called it their church. Greg Cahill of Special Consensus, looking…

Photo Courtesy of Roy M. Andrade The tiny Appalachian town of Mountain City, Tennessee (population around 2,500), sits in the northeastern corner of the state, about halfway between Bristol, Tennessee, and Boone, North Carolina.  At 2,418 feet, it is the highest incorporated town in Tennessee, and the county seat for Johnson County, in one of…