Articles

This young, award-winning fiddler and long-time bandmate of Darin and Brooke Aldridge makes a confident and impressive solo debut with this fine outing.  Arrowhead, who was once a featured musician in the IBMA’s annual Kids on Bluegrass program, also proves to be an accomplished singer and songwriter with wisdom and artistry beyond her years. You…

Best known for his songwriting of jam band style music for his St. Paul, Minnesota-based group Big Wu, Chris Castino took advantage of the COVID isolation over the past two years to rework and rearrange some of his catalog into bluegrass tunes. For this new project he has gathered together his friends in the Chicken…

“This album is for me an extension of my grandfather’s front porch,” writes Matthew Stallard, a retired English professor, gifted musician and formidable researcher of both traditional music and his own family’s storied history. “It’s a piece of him that I can carry with me that no one can take away from me.” Stallard calls…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine February 1986, Volume 20, Number 8 East Tennessee, the late 1950s, a boy just entering adolescence chops a borrowed mandolin, hoping to find the same licks he heard Bill Monroe play on the Opry the Saturday night before. The boy summons up the courage to wrap the mandolin in a…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine November 1980, Volume 15, Number 5 “I’ve always been a pusher,” allows Doyle Lawson matter-of-factly. “If I’m doin’ good, I want to do better. I’ve never been as good as I want to be—as good as I can be. I hope I never get as good as I want to…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine February 1987,  Volume 21, Number 8  It was some band. I can still remember my amazement hearing the Kentucky Colonels for the first time, wondering how any five individuals could play music with such speed, drive, and excitement, song after song. There was an unbridled — almost wild-eyed — enthusiasm…