Articles

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1976, Volume 11, Number 2 Carl Sauceman is a pioneer of whom all too little is known. As a youth, he and his younger brother J.P. Sauceman both witnessed and participated in the changes which transformed the mountain style music of the 1930s into modern bluegrass. Up to now,…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine December 1973, Volume 8, Number 6 In the summer of 1971, four young men rented a mountain cabin fifteen miles northwest of Boulder, Colorado, high on Gold Hill, a snow-swept ridge overlooking the Rocky Mountain National Park. They had a panoramic view from their front door, but they had something…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine October 2010, Volume 45, Number 4 It’s hard to imagine, when today bluegrass boasts headliners such as Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent and a host of superpickers including Alison Brown, Sierra Hull, Missy Raines, and the SteelDrivers’ Tammy Rogers, but it wasn’t long ago that women weren’t welcome in the…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 2005, Volume 39, Number 11 It was me and John and Paul, the best friends you ever saw.  The lyrics from a new Harley Allen composition, released last February on the Grascals’ Rounder Records debut, is the poignant story of three friends who stick together—and stick up for each…

Based in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Buck McCumbers heads a band called “Buck and Company,” but for this release he gathered together some different players and renamed the band “The Hillbillies.” Included in the studio are McCumbers (mandolin, vocals), Eric Chichester (guitar, vocals), Dodd Walker (bass, vocals), Rick Ellis (banjo, guitar), Hunter Lemon (fiddle), and brother…

A short while I ago, I interviewed Jerry Douglas for BU about his induction into the IBMA Hall of Fame and in a side conversation that did not make the article, we talked about one of the things he tried to bring to the genre other than musicianship, and that was the desire to produce…