Articles

In the increasingly crowded arena of custom and boutique flatpicks, we’ve seen an interesting trend develop. One on side, we find makers who’ve discovered that certain existing industrial materials developed for wildly different purposes than plucking the string of a guitar or mandolin can be fashioned into world-class plectra. The second track we see is…

Steve Bruce is a local pastor in LaFollette, Tennessee, who is also a banjo player and songwriter. On this project of his original material, Bruce is accompanied by his son Andrew Bruce (guitar, bass, resonator guitar), and guests Ron Stewart (mandolin, fiddle), and Glen Duncan (fiddle).  This is an all-instrumental project with Bruce’s excellent banjo…

Continuing the Scruggs Style Banjo Tradition Earl Scruggs helped define bluegrass music as we know it today and he originated the style of playing the five-string banjo that formed the foundation for banjo players in bluegrass music.  Many banjo players feel that there has been no one that has matched Earl’s mastery of this style,…

“I had no natural inclination towards music, beyond being drawn to the instrument through this one song that brought me in,”  explains banjo picker Mike Munford, the 2013 IBMA “Banjo Player of the Year,” about his discovery of the instrument that would change his life.  That one song was the Flatt & Scruggs’ classic, “Foggy…

The ProPik brand of finger and thumb picks that are used by banjo, Dobro, fingerstyle guitar, and autoharp players have been available for forty years.  The story of how the company got their start is an interesting one.  It begins in 1982 when a guitar-playing design engineer named Jim Mapson, who lived in Orange County,…

Jeff Black credits a small-but-mighty banjo with providing inspiration for his song, “Gold Heart Locket,” recorded by Black (B-Sides and Confessions/2003) and later by Sam Bush (Circles Around Me/2009). “I’ll always think that song was in that little banjo,” said Black, during a songwriter’s round at The Bluebird Cafe, Nashville. In an exclusive interview for…