Articles

This veteran East Tennessee banjo maestro has performed and toured with just about everyone over the years, including, for starters, the Osborne Brothers, Jim & Jesse, Marty Raybon and Tim Raybon. And he’s gained a slew of friends and admirers along the way. He’s called upon many of these friends while producing his star-studded debut…

At age 16, Mei Lin Heirendt, lead singer and fiddler with this northern California-based quartet, is already a veteran of sorts. She started playing the violin at age 7, and has simply never stopped.  Since she was a child, she’s been involved with and nurtured by the California Bluegrass Association and is currently the organization’s…

Although Sally Jones is fairly ubiquitous in the world of bluegrass music, this album travels a little off the beaten path. These recordings start in the earlier years of Sally Jones’s transatlantic tour with the Sidewinders, featuring Kristin Scott Benson on banjo, Mickey Harris on bass, and Brad Meinerding on mandolin. The rest of the…

Annick Odom, lead singer and principal songwriter of this trio—named after a wild flower that proliferates in Appalachian West Virginia—grew up in two cultures and spend her formative years in both West Virginia and the Netherlands, where she formed this band.  Sweet Joe Pye currently divides its time between Europe and the Morgantown, West Virginia,…

Mastering: The Final Gut Check Even if you have never been in a recording studio, you probably have a sense of the recording process at its most rudimentary level.  Set out a microphone, play or sing into it and a machine records the sounds.  Of course, there is much more to both the art and…

The “Pickin’ On” series has been running for nearly three decades now, cranking out over forty records. They have successfully bridged the gap between traditional bluegrass and popular music of the 20th and 21st century. The series first began to captivate bluegrass audiences with the Pickin’ on the Grateful Dead album in 1997 and went…