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Dan Levenson’s name will be well known to anyone who is familiar with old-time music, especially banjo and fiddle players. He is a performer, recording artist and educator. He has published instructional books, produced videos, written magazine articles and taught many workshops. If you are familiar with any of this previous work, you will know…

A Bluegrass Journey On March 28, 2024, the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum opens its largest and most interactive temporary exhibition to date—Jerry Garcia:  A Bluegrass Journey.  The exhibition traces the bluegrass career of Jerry Garcia, a music icon known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead.  Born out of the counterculture…

We all have days when we could use a good-humored song with a classic feel. If that’s you today, I recommend “End of the End of the World,” written by Adam Wright, which fits that bill with playful perfection. As the title suggests, it takes a run-of-the-mill phrase, end of the world, and gives it…

And the Culture of Roots Music Throughout their career the Grateful Dead loaded their song repertoire with American roots music traditions from top to bottom. The Dead were interested in roots music largely because of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s (the Dead’s lyricist) early exposure to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. This anthology…

The Doctor Is In To say that there are a lot of people providing guitar instruction on YouTube is an understatement…there are thousands…maybe tens of thousands.  Refine your search to bluegrass and fiddle tunes and the numbers drop, but there are still hundreds.  Refine the search again to look for someone who has taught bluegrass…

Bands Blurring the Lines of Bluegrass “The cool thing about Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band is we thought we were something special,” says Anders Beck with a laugh, “but we were just five dumb kids.  Only time can tell if we were right or not.  I guess we were something pretty special though, because the bands…