Articles

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited MagazineJuly 1972, Volume 7, Number 1 Imagine, if you can, a big-name bluegrass band—one which usually has a superior banjo player—stepping out onto the stage to greet their cheering, enthusiastic fans. With them is a new banjo player—very new—like, 14 years old, and a complete unknown. The fans are more than…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited MagazineAugust 1974, Volume 9, Number 2 Some two decades ago, a young Kentucky-born factory worker from Springfield, Ohio, went to Nashville, in hopes of getting an established country singer to record a song he had written. Although he had made something of a reputation as a part-time performer around local radio…

A Music Seldom Heard Written By Dale McCurry with Bambi Grinder “Make it about the music,” Mike Smith implores. “Don’t make it about me. It’s about the music.” Mike said this in preparation for a story I was to write about him a decade or so ago. I remember he followed me to the parking…

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…

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…