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IssueM Articles
Jim & Jesse—Testing the Boundaries of Bluegrass Music (With A Little Help From Charlie Louvin)
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine September 1982, Volume 17, Number 3 It is one of the great ironies of bluegrass music that one of its most consistently popular acts has also been consistently stepping outside the bluegrass mainstream. Throughout their career Jim and Jesse have stretched the definition of this music, have experimented with arrangements…
The Osborne Brothers
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine July, 1984, Volume 19, Number 1 Bobby Osborne—Living Out The Legend, Outliving The Threat Bobby Osborne has a dream of making a movie someday, a story about bluegrass. “Maybe my own life story,” he suggests. In many ways, the Osborne Brothers’ story is the story of bluegrass. The events in…
An Oasis of Roots Music and Dance in the Blue Ridge Mountains
The Blue Ridge Parkway is one of America’s great tourist attractions. The word ‘attraction’ might not be a proper description, however, as it is simply a beautiful drive on a road built almost a century ago on top of the Blue Ridge Mountains that exposes the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains, considered the second-oldest mountains…
Railroad Town Without A Train
By Thomm Jutz and Tim Stafford Thomm Jutz and Tim Stafford have a knack—individually and together—for writing historical-themed songs. The two have cowritten such songs for other artists and for their aptly named duo album, Lost Voices (March 2023), which includes“Take That Shot,” about the place of photography in our lives historically; “Vaudeville Blues,” based on…
Tone Traveler
Over the past 15 years or so, the guitar industry has embraced a controversial, even divisive, new trend: relicing new guitars to make them sound, appear and feel like they’ve been played for decades. Some people love this, and companies like Pre War Guitar Co. have carved a strong niche in this area. Others, however,…
Songs Of Our Grandfathers
Over the course of five albums and a little more than a decade, Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller have developed an inspired union of two disparate yet surprisingly compatible musical styles: bluegrass and klezmer. (Their musical journey is detailed in the May 2023 issue of BU.) Bluegrass, of course, needs no explanation here,…