Articles

Rising mandolin star Scott Napier’s career and life are on an upward trajectory. He’s just joined Wildfire as their new mandolinist, and he’s married to the stellar Lauren Price Napier of the Price Sisters, one of the top players and teachers of the pure Monroe-style bluegrass mandolin embodied by the likes of Mike Compton and…

Paolo Ercoli is a resonator guitarist from Brianza, Italy who has performed with many artists such as Eric Anderson, Malcolm Holcombe, Steve Forbert, and Kevin Welch, to name a few. Ercoli also plays mandolin, guitar and pedal steel, but he is best known as a square neck resonator guitarist, having been influenced by the playing…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1974, Volume 8, Number 11 “Deacon Dan” Crary is perhaps theology’s best-known contemporary bluegrass musician. Other professions, of course, have their representatives in the Bluegrass Hall of Fame … John Starling operates for the medical doctors, and commercial artists can boast Mike Auldridge (both of the Seldom Scene). But…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine February 1982, Volume 16, Number 8 For years the role of women in country music has been a topic of discussion by critics and historians of that field of popular entertainment. From one extreme come statements such as that of author Dorothy Horstman who has said that “Country music until…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine June 1974, Volume 8, Number 12 The following conversation occurred after The Seldom Scene had finished their evening concert at the Red Fox restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s their story—it’s told the way they want to tell it in the hope that the reader may gain a valuable insight into…

This is the last in our series of sixteen articles about the historic tour that the Japanese band Bluegrass 45 took fifty years ago in the summer of 1971.  In order to help us come full circle, we would like to offer some memories of that summer from legendary bluegrass banjo player Ben Eldridge, who…