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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…

 “We started out right/Pickin’ in the pines/It’s a music that stays in your soul.”   Although AJ Lee is currently only twenty-four years old, she has been turning heads at California bluegrass events for nearly two decades.  AJ attended her first festival when she was five years old and, as part of the Kids On…

Restless Wanderer is R. Wesley Carr’s first full-length project. Carr is the 2019 winner Winfield, Kansas’ National Mandolin Championship and the title song won the New Song songwriting contest. Carr studied classical music at Northern Illinois University and is a graduate of East Tennessee State’s music program. This collection is a mix of originals and…

Derek Johnson, who has spent more than a decade with Monroe Crossing, has released a new solo project entitled Hard Life.  Johnson calls his “band” on the album Hardgrass, but it is a collection of 19 guest musicians from Minnesota—where he’s based—and Wisconsin. Johnson, who has also performed as part of The High 48s and…

It is hard not to think of Darren Nicholson’s sense of humor not far into his latest solo album, Man on a Mission.  The opening bars of the first song, “Love is War,” start with hard driving banjo and fiddle and the sound Nicholson is known for with Balsam Range and his main side-gig, the…