Articles

We Shall All Be Reunited Revisiting The Bristol Sessions Bear Family Records BCD 17592 It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a century since the renowned recording sessions arranged by Ralph Peer in Bristol.  The music captured those few weeks in late summer 1927 helped to catapult Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to…

Roger Cline So Inclined Walnut Run Music WRM0002      Marylander Roger Cline began playing guitar in the late ‘60s, eventually turning to bluegrass and acoustic music in the ‘90’s. He began writing songs and also picked up the mandolin. On this debut project, Cline features his songwriting, his singing and playing and is accompanied…

Jon Stickley Trio Scripting the flip Since Bill Monroe first played what we would come to know as bluegrass, the bluegrass world has been split into two factions, those who never want to see the music change from what he first created so many years ago and those who happily wish to see the music…

Who is the big man in the white shirt, black slacks and two-tone shoes, crowned with a homburg hat? And is he really a pioneer and living legend of the bluegrass banjo? The answers are: Roger Sprung, and yes, yes indeed. Roger was a central figure in the Folk Music Revival of the 1950s and…

Taking Us Back to 1971 For those in the bluegrass community who have been unable to attend live festivals since February  because of COVID-19, a trip back to Carlton Haney’s Blue Grass Park in Camp Springs, North Carolina on Labor Day weekend, 1971, might be just the ticket.  The remastered, boxed set version of the…

Photos By Jamie Alexander So says the song that Bill Monroe wrote about his fiddle playing Uncle Pendleton Vandiver, brother to his mother, Malissa.  Speaking of his Uncle Pen in a 1966 radio interview, Monroe said, “He played for a lot of square dances in Kentucky….There wasn’t many musicians around and back in the early…