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Photo by Scott Simontacchi After fifteen years playing together, Mike Compton and Joe Newberry are releasing their first studio album Home in My Heart. The project combines new arrangements of old standards and original songs with a traditional flavor, delivered clean and spare. The result showcases their unique blend of vocal harmony and instrumental virtuosity….

The story of one of America’s greatest bluegrass bands begins in Maine in the French-speaking home of Eric and Mildred LeBlanc. The LeBlanc family was of French-Canadian stock from New Brunswick, Canada, and they were a musical lot. Three of the LeBlanc sons were especially musical. Sometime around 1950, the family began using the Anglicized…

Listening to the new duo CD from Mike Compton and Joe Newberry feels like reading the manuscript of a lost Faulkner novella discovered at a flea market in Mike Compton’s native Lauderdale County, Mississippi. The stories are real and raw, but disclosed in measured doses, through voices at times tortured and others reverent. It’s music…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1988, Volume 23, Number 2 If the term “Morgan Thoroughbred” makes you think of horses, and not banjos, then you haven’t met Tom Morgan yet. If you already know that the Thoroughbred banjo is a superb instrument designed and built by Tom and hand-crafted at the Morgan Company, you…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1983, Volume 17, Number 11 Jimmy Arnold popped in and out of the bluegrass scene in the seventies. During that time, the Virginia native managed to record one banjo and one guitar album for Rebel. Jimmy also put in a few years playing mainly banjo with Joe Greene, Cliff…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine February 2007, Volume 41, Number 8 As I pulled off 1-81 at the Marion, Va. exit and headed into the mountains on Rt. 16, I recalled the first time I ever met Wayne Henderson. I had enrolled in a guitar workshop at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., and…