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From China To Appalachia

This intriguing, East-meets-West collaboration started at the Strathmore Music Center, near Washington, D.C., where Chao Tian, a visual artist and master of the Chinese hammered dulcimer, was artist in residence. Tian’s music caught the attention of Maryland-based folk veterans Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, and the result is this imaginative collaboration, which they’ve since taken…

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Orchard Creek Band poses in front of the majestic Sangre de Cristo mountain range at High Mountain Hay Fever. // Photo by Vicki Quarles

A Good Time for a Good Cause

When a few families in the Wet Mountain Valley of southern Colorado took note of the lack of children’s health services in the early 2000s they did what most people with the means to help might do, they donated money to the local clinic to be used by anyone who needed financial assistance. A year…

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Carl Sauceman: The Odessey Of A Bluegrass Pioneer

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1976, Volume 11, Number 2 Carl Sauceman is a pioneer of whom all too little is known. As a youth, he and his younger brother J.P. Sauceman both witnessed and participated in the changes which transformed the mountain style music of the 1930s into modern bluegrass. Up to now,…

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Ome Banjo Company

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine December 1973, Volume 8, Number 6 In the summer of 1971, four young men rented a mountain cabin fifteen miles northwest of Boulder, Colorado, high on Gold Hill, a snow-swept ridge overlooking the Rocky Mountain National Park. They had a panoramic view from their front door, but they had something…

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Kristen Scott Benson with The Grascals — Cutting The Grass Ceiling

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine October 2010, Volume 45, Number 4 It’s hard to imagine, when today bluegrass boasts headliners such as Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent and a host of superpickers including Alison Brown, Sierra Hull, Missy Raines, and the SteelDrivers’ Tammy Rogers, but it wasn’t long ago that women weren’t welcome in the…

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Get Ready for The Grascals

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 2005, Volume 39, Number 11 It was me and John and Paul, the best friends you ever saw.  The lyrics from a new Harley Allen composition, released last February on the Grascals’ Rounder Records debut, is the poignant story of three friends who stick together—and stick up for each…

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