Articles

The growing number of performers writing songs and developing their own sound within bluegrass and elsewhere face a couple of choices when preserving those carefully nurtured songs beyond a simple smartphone video or voice memo. If you want to overdub instrumental or vocal tracks, there’re several choices, including doing your overdubs and mixing directly on…

Darol Anger’s unmistakable fiddle tone has graced a huge variety of recording projects from Dawg music to bluegrass to jazz and a few stops in-between. A founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, Anger’s distinctive sound, produced on his five-string violin, has dueled melodically with virtually every contemporary bluegrass master.      His latest project,…

On their new CD, Wild Mountain Honey, Riverbend steers a course sticking close to the traditional bluegrass found on their earlier disc. Populated with strong (mostly) covers of traditional bluegrass tunes from Mac Wiseman, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe and more, Riverbend blends classic and contemporary influences into a strong original sound.     The…

Every once in a while, in the greater bluegrass world, you come across a new album that sounds fresh and feels good and that is the case for the new release Flyin’ High by The Wooks.  Based out of Lexington, KY, and Nashville, the Wooks are made up of bluegrass veteran CJ Cain on guitar…

Golden State Boys Blue Diamond Boys The Hillmen In 1954, Herb Rice and his wife Louise Poindexter packed up their three sons—Larry, Tony and Ron (in utero)—and left Danville, Virginia, for the Los Angeles area, settling in Downey. Herb was a master welder following the work and soon had a good job at Douglas Aircraft….

There aren’t many people who have led a working bluegrass band for 50 years. Bill Monroe did it, with his Blue Grass Boys. Mac Martin did it in Pittsburgh, with his Dixie Travelers. And Butch Waller has done it in San Francisco, with High Country, an outstanding traditionally oriented bluegrass band now in its fifty-third…