Articles

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine September 1978, Volume 13, Number 3 “Precious memories, how they linger, How they ever flood my soul. In the stillness of the midnight, precious sacred scenes unfold.” J.B. Wright That song both opens and closes Marty Stuart’s “With A Little Help From My Friends” album. It is an appropriate number…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine April 1985, Volume 19, Number 10 In any conversation about the great musicians in the formative years of bluegrass music one name always comes up, Rudy Lyle. Rudy played the banjo on many of the classic Bill Monroe recordings including “Rawhide,” “On & On,” “Sugar Coated Love,” and probably his…

I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages Cold chills. That’s what I get when I hear the eerie voice of Ralph Stanley. You can say that I’ve been a true-blue Stanley Brothers nut since I first heard them in 1962. Just thumbing through my collection of LPs, I count 58 Stanley Brothers or Ralph Stanley…

Peter Rowan, Norman Blake and Paul “Moon” Mullins When the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) announces its list of new Hall of Fame inductees every year ahead of the annual Awards Show in Raleigh, North Carolina, the names always garner attention, discussion and respect. In the year of 2022, the Hall of Fame inductee class…

Harboring The Legacy Photo by Megan Sweeting Briar Fork was in many ways your typical holler in eastern Kentucky, a rural road off State Route 32, four miles from Sandy Hook, near the Little Sandy River. Elliott County has some of the prettiest scenery in the state. It’s not exactly in the bluegrass region that…

Soft-cover. 147 pages. Includes banjo tablature. Illustrations by Giselle Harrington The Bill Monroe band of Blue Grass Boys that included Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs (1946-1947) has often been called the “greatest bluegrass group of all time.” But, as Tony Trischka says in his intro to Max Wareham’s new book, Rudy Lyle: The Unsung Hero…