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Bennington College Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont started as a women’s college in 1932 and transitioned to a co-educational institution in 1969.  One of its claims to fame is that the college was “the first to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner to the liberal arts curriculum.”  As a performing art, bluegrass slowly…

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,…

The band is called The Kody Norris “Show,” and over the last few years, a listener only must take in a couple of songs to get it.  The band’s latest release, Rhinestone Revival, is another step towards the top tier of bluegrass. Although the single “Mountain Rosalie” was released last fall, the full album didn’t…

Though still a relatively young man, Ben Krakauer has put together a remarkable career. He’s been a professor and lecturer at a number of prestigious universities. He’s an ethnomusicologist who has studied and written on topics ranging from experimental bluegrass in New York City in the 1970s to the dotara players of West Bengal. Krakauer…

Since the days of his youth, Tim O’Brien has sought out the open road of roots music with an open mind. After leaving is home in Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1970s to explore the west of America in old used cars and by thumbing to California, he eventually landed in Colorado where he made…

Daryl Mosley, a former member of New Tradition, the Osborne Brothers band and The Farm Hands, is a charismatic singer and a remarkable songwriter.  The songs on his third album, much like on his 2020 The Secret of Life and his 2021 follow-up Small Town Dreamer, poignantly capture everyday virtues, sentiments, reminisces and musings on…