Articles

For over half a century, old-time/bluegrass music has connected the author with a wide variety of interesting and highly talented people, including autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, musicians in New Zealand, and Virginians transplanted to Detroit. The following is a selective appreciation. On the Fourth of July weekend in 1971, I attended Carlton Haney’s bluegrass festival…

Photo by Jamie Alexander “JT was a big wheel in the business,” said the award-winning songwriter and bluegrass musician Larry Cordle just days after the death of the Station Inn’s JT Gray on March 20th, 2021. “This is what blows my mind about him losing his life. I mean, he just got his due. He…

“In a dreary Yankee prison where a rebel soldier lay.”  That is the opening line to the Charlie Moore classic “The Legend Of The Rebel Soldier,” which Moore had recorded on his 1974 Old Homestead release, The Fiddler. But it was the Country Gentlemen’s cover of the song a year earlier on their 1973 Rebel…

Photos by Sheri Oneal lthough Ashley Campbell carries the DNA of one of the most talented singers and instrumentalists in the history of American music, she did not aspire to be a musician when she was young.  The youngest daughter of country music legend Glen Campbell said, “My brothers Cal and Shannon where more into…

Photo by Arnold Flenor Mackenzie Bell is a 15-year-old fiddle player who was born in Guatemala, adopted at the age of seven months, and has grown up just 10 miles from Bill Monroe’s hometown of Rosine, Kentucky.  When she was 7-years-old she heard a friend play the fiddle and thought that this was something that…

Photo by Daniel Coston For nearly half a century, fiddling ace Mike Hartgrove of the Lonesome River Band has been traveling highways across America playing bluegrass and country music.  “Mike is a road pro,” says Lonesome River Band leader Sammy Shelor. “The guy has been on the road since he was 17 years old, about…