Articles

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine February 1973, Volume 7, Number 8 It isn’t Smilin’Jim at all but actually Homer Robert, Jr. son of Bob Eanes a renowned old-time banjo picker from the small southwestern Virginia town of Mountain Valley. Mountain Valley is about fifteen miles from Martinsville in the heart of a circle of approximately…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1980, Volume 15, Number 2 It all started with mama. It seemed like she could make music on about anything with strings on it and some things that didn’t, like the french harp. There never was enough time for mama to play, what with raising six rambunctious sons. But…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1993, Volume 27, Number 11 The creases around his eyes cast deeper shadows now and distinguished touches of gray highlight his beard. Gone is the skinny young man who was thrilled to have Byron Berline and Jethro Burns play on his solo album. In his place stands a mature,…

Photos by Lance LeRoy Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine October 1982, Volume 17, Number 4 The classic bluegrass music sound as most refer to it today was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on a Saturday night in the latter part of 1945, when Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Howard (Cedric Rainwater) Watts and “Chubby” Wise…

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…

Bluegrass has never been known as a producer’s music. The bands get famous; the producers of their albums don’t. Unlike their counterparts in such genres as rock, soul, hip-hop, or country, bluegrass record producers have mostly toiled in obscurity, their contributions known only to a few. Jim Dickson deserves better than that, deserves to be…