Articles

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my late 1950s interest in folk music and blues turned toward bluegrass around 1958-9. By 1960, I had been “bit by the bug,” as they say. In August of that year, the Redwood Canyon Ramblers, the local college band, gave a concert where I met their singer…

In my opinion, John Reischman does everything that relates to playing the mandolin extremely well.  His tone, timing, dynamics, phrasing…you name it, he does it at the level of mastery.  A few other things that he can do extremely well—which proves to me that he is not only a phenomenal mandolin player, but also an…

[Editor’s Note: We ran this review in the September 2025, however, there were some inaccuracies in that review.  Because of those inaccuracies, I decided to run the review again with corrections included.  Our apologies to Volume Five for the previous inaccurate review.] Mississippi fiddle player Glen Harrell founded Volume Five in 2008, originally as a…

Just one more year. That mantra still runs through the mind of Special Consensus co-founder Greg Cahill. The banjoist and band leader who started the long-running bluegrass group wanted to play music for a living, but for many years, he had more bills to pay in one hand than dollar bills brought in from the…

Featuring The Bluegrass Cardinals, Hot Rize and Arnold Shultz Whenever I have interviewed bluegrass musicians who were born and raised west of the  Mississippi River, not only do I tend to ask them about the bluegrass scene in their part of the world, I also ask them if they felt like they grew up far…

The Horsenecks hail from the western Oregon area of Astoria. They are the duo of Gabrielle Macrae (fiddle, bass, banjo, harmonium, guitar, vocals) and Barry Southern (guitar, banjo, resonator guitar, vocals). This new project, their fourth, is a mix of mostly original tunes from Macrea along with a few from Southern. They are joined by…