Articles

Bluegrass Unlimited first conducted a Reader’s Poll in 1967, the year after the magazine was established.  A second poll was conducted in 1971.  I asked Dick Spottswood, who was working for the magazine in those days, if he knew why the Reader’s Poll was not continued.  He replied, “In 1967 we were still trying to…

Photo by Craig Etchison For many musicians, releasing an album at twenty would be considered quite an achievement. At twenty, Liam Purcell of Cane Mill Road is preparing to release his fifth full-length album later this year. Now a senior at Berklee College of Music, where he studies music business and performance, Purcell continues a…

The phrase suggests a mystical or wizardly sort, surrounded by banjos and the tools used to bring them closer to the ideal. Marc Horowitz is THE Banjo Whisperer. While researching this story about Marc, everyone I approached (banjo players, designers, builders, and musical contemporaries) quickly responded with effusive praise. Marc’s daughter Leah Horowitz (an accomplished…

At a recent concert, after her sound check, bluegrass veteran Murphy Henry heard music over the house speakers that stopped her in her tracks. Bewildered, she was hearing one of her original songs being sung by the Queen of Bluegrass Rhonda Vincent. Running through her mental bluegrass database, there was no notion found anywhere in…

Not much time passes before there’s a fresh musical salute to one or another of bluegrass’s founding figures. These tributes not only strengthen and reaffirm bluegrass’s crucial links to its past, they also seem to provide a subtle moral compass in terms of reinforcing the music’s integrity with each new generation of musicians. Along those…

East Kentucky-born Carl Bentley grew up singing in church in and around his hometown of McDowell. At age 10, he was given a Ralph Stanley album featuring Keith Whitley by his father, who was also a musician.  That was all it took. To this day, Bentley still wears the Stanley-Whitley influence, and wears it well….