Articles

Q: I just found that Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs actually recorded “The Family Who Prays Never Shall Part.” I know this is an old Louvin Brothers song, but do you know by chance when Flatt and Scruggs recorded it? Wayne Hoffman, via email. A: The song was never commercially recorded by Flatt & Scruggs,…

Just one more year. That mantra still runs through the mind of Special Consensus co-founder Greg Cahill. The banjoist and band leader who started the long-running bluegrass group wanted to play music for a living, but for many years, he had more bills to pay in one hand than dollar bills brought in from the…

Ben Garnett is best known in bluegrass circles as the longtime guitarist with Missy Raines and Allegheny. But he’s also a rising star on the new acoustic music scene. It was while majoring in jazz guitar performance at North Texas University that Garnett discovered artists such as Tony Rice, the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and…

[Editor’s Note: We ran this review in the September 2025, however, there were some inaccuracies in that review.  Because of those inaccuracies, I decided to run the review again with corrections included.  Our apologies to Volume Five for the previous inaccurate review.] Mississippi fiddle player Glen Harrell founded Volume Five in 2008, originally as a…

In 2015, Seth Mulder and some friends began playing at the local Ole Smokey Moonshine Distillery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The group based their music on traditional bluegrass with a more modern approach, and by 2018, Seth and Midnight Run band became official. Since then, the band has gained in popularity, and they have been busy…

Bluegrass has never been known as a producer’s music. The bands get famous; the producers of their albums don’t. Unlike their counterparts in such genres as rock, soul, hip-hop, or country, bluegrass record producers have mostly toiled in obscurity, their contributions known only to a few. Jim Dickson deserves better than that, deserves to be…