Articles

Photos by Ben Wright With the release of their latest album Lead and Iron and after more than nineteen years as a band, Chicago-based Henhouse Prowlers has settled on the right combination. They started as a six-piece band playing every Tuesday night at a neighborhood bar on the north side of Chicago. As they started…

Ensuring A Bright Future For Bluegrass Photo By Angela Norton Nancy Cardwell Webster is no stranger to readers of Bluegrass Unlimited. The award-winning  Missouri native has written dozens of articles for BU through the years, including this edition’s cover story featuring resophonic guitar master, Jerry Douglas.  A prolific wordsmith, Nancy wrote her first story for…

Q: I’ve heard it said that the 1959 Folkways album Mountain Music Bluegrass Style was the first bluegrass album ever recorded.  I guess that means a set of songs and tunes recorded specifically to be released in album format.  Does that sound right to you?  I recall purchasing albums by the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe,…

University of Missouri Press  Howard Wight Marshall, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri, has recently completed his trilogy covering the history of fiddling in the state of Missouri.  The first book in the series, titled Play Me Something Quick and Devilish (2013) begins with what is known about fiddling from the time of…

And then there are the albums that make a listener just think, “wow.” Sometimes one comes along that’s hard to pick a handful of songs to focus on because—to borrow an old phrase—it’s all killer, no filler. That’s the case with Carson Peters & Iron Mountain’s latest album, Gotta Lotta Lonesome. Eight of the 12…

Songwriters are the eyes of the world and Baltimore songwriter Caleb Stine’s eyes are better than most.  Armed with a storyteller’s inquisitiveness and a restless independent spirit, Stine is songwriter of uncompromising heft, he can spin tales that are joyful expressions, songs that are serious meditations on life, and write tunes that are all of…