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The Delmore Brothers—On The Opry

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine October 1989, Volume 24, Number 4 Without a doubt, the most popular group on the Opry in the mid-1930s was the group that became perhaps the most famous singing duo in country music history, the Delmore Brothers. They joined the show in the spring of 1933. To the casual fan,…

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Photo by rhonda griffith

Right On Time

The Past Kim Robins—singer, songwriter, band leader, entrepreneur, nurse, mother, grandmother and all-around busy woman—produced her first recording in 2013. It is still available and titled Forty Years Late. “What’s the fuss” you might wonder? The buzz is that Kim was somewhat “late” in life in getting to the point where that CD was created…

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Pixie & The Partygrass Boys (left to right): Ben Weiss, Katia “Pixie” Racine, Zach Downes, Amanda B. Grapes, Andrew Nelson. // Photo by Dave Vann

On The Fringe

Bands Blurring the Lines of Bluegrass For Pixie & the Partygrass Boys, one of the most important pillars of bluegrass is what drives the band. “Community is everything for us,” says Zach Downes. “It’s the reason we sit in a van for hours each day. To be able to connect with fans and different bands…

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The Life and Work of Lloyd Allayre Loar

Lloyd Loar stands, like Mario Maccaferri and Gibson’s Ted McCarty and Leo Fender, as one of the foundational stringed instrument designers in recent history. His acoustic engineering advancements in Gibson’s mandolin family instruments in the 1920s created (inadvertently) the ultimate bluegrass mandolin design—the legendary F-5 played by everyone from Bill Monroe to Wyatt Ellis.   …

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Blue & Gray

New Mexico’s Higher Ground Bluegrass is celebrating 25 years of music with this ninth project. The band was established in 1998 by Duke Weddington, banjo player and primary songwriter, and in the past the band has opened for such artists as Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen, Tim O’Brien, The Infamous Stringdusters, and Peter Rowan, and…

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Kentucky Shine

This Owensboro, Kentucky-based band’s second album is one of those projects where all the pieces fall almost magically together. This owes to Kentucky Shine’s fine singing, playing and songwriting as well as their sure-handed grasp of the music’s thematic and instrumental traditions. Night Watch features two covers. One is a revival of the Osborne Brothers’…

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