Articles

Queries Q: The title track to the Gillis Brothers and their Hard-Driving Bluegrass Band’s second CD, “Ice Cold Stone” (Hay Holler HHH-CD-302, 1992), is somewhat of a mystery. Larry and John Gillis learned the song at a jam session and label owner Kerry Hay, who helped arrange it for the album, was unable to trace…

Mickey Galyean hails from Low Gap, Surry County, North Carolina. He is the son of Cullen Galyean whose deep bluegrass legacy helped form young Mickey’s music. Galyean formed the Cullen’s Bridge band to continue and honor the traditional mountain music that has become his own style.  On this project, Galyean (guitar, vocals), is joined by…

I’m not going to lie—when I grabbed the newest CD in the stack for review, I didn’t think much beyond that the woodcut cover art was unique.  When Put All Your Troubles Away by the Foreign Landers started spinning, it only took a few seconds to grab my attention and it never let go. It…

This is Charlie Treat’s first foray into bluegrass, and with its austere, hard-charging guitar-banjo-bass-fiddle arrangements, it’s definitely very on-the-edge, and very compelling. As he explains in the accompanying press material, Treat has been steeped in traditional sounds since he was a kid growing up on a farm in New England, though along the way he’s…

ToneSlabs is the biggest advance in flatpack technology since the launch of BlueChip picks 14 years ago. That’s a bold statement, to be sure, and we don’t make it lightly.      For months, Bluegrass Unlimited has been testing a variety of ToneSlabs picks in various shapes and thicknesses in the field at Winfield and…

The Challenges of Running and Starting a Bluegrass Festival After over thirty years of attending bluegrass festivals, more than once we have heard the saying, “Friends don’t let friends start bluegrass festivals.” While it is meant playfully, we wondered if there is some truth in it and decided to look at the complexity of starting…