Articles

Trailhead Records Roots is an interesting and fun album just on the merits of spinning in the CD player.  But on closer inspection when the listener finds out it was literally created with a one-man band and that the one man—Liam Purcell—wrote all but one song (he co-wrote the other), it becomes an even more…

After playing on the road with Jimmy Martin off-and-on for five years, Bill Emerson decided that he had had enough of the intense road travel.  He still wanted to play music, but he did not want to be out on the road quite as much as being a member of Jimmy Martin and the Sunny…

By Ralph Rinzler Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts Washington, D.C. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys will be presented in a musical workshop and a full solo concert March 10th at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, Baird Auditorium, Washington, D.C. While bluegrass has been heard for seven years at the Smithsonian’s…

At the end of the last installment of this series, Bill Emerson was working with Red Allen and Frank Wakefield.  Regarding that experience, in an interview conducted by Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine in 1992, Bill said, “Red Allen and Frank Wakefield came to town and were looking for a banjo player. We did a lot of…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine June 1976, Volume 10, Number 12 One chilly afternoon last November I drove the sixty-or-so miles from my home in central Ohio to The Country Palace, a tavern on the southeast edge of Columbus, to talk with Ralph Stanley, who was booked there for the weekend. I had been asked…

Photos Courtesy of Ralph Stanley Museum Nestled in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains about eight miles northeast of Ralph Stanley’s birthplace, McClure, Virginia, sits a bastion of traditional mountain music.  Old familiar dirt roads wind through the piney glade Where all the longings of childhood dreams were made Where we passed the mossy mounds where I…