Articles

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine August 1980, Volume 15, Number 2 It all started with mama. It seemed like she could make music on about anything with strings on it and some things that didn’t, like the french harp. There never was enough time for mama to play, what with raising six rambunctious sons. But…

Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine May 1993, Volume 27, Number 11 The creases around his eyes cast deeper shadows now and distinguished touches of gray highlight his beard. Gone is the skinny young man who was thrilled to have Byron Berline and Jethro Burns play on his solo album. In his place stands a mature,…

Photos by Lance LeRoy Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine October 1982, Volume 17, Number 4 The classic bluegrass music sound as most refer to it today was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on a Saturday night in the latter part of 1945, when Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Howard (Cedric Rainwater) Watts and “Chubby” Wise…

[Editor’s Note: We ran this review in the September 2025, however, there were some inaccuracies in that review.  Because of those inaccuracies, I decided to run the review again with corrections included.  Our apologies to Volume Five for the previous inaccurate review.] Mississippi fiddle player Glen Harrell founded Volume Five in 2008, originally as a…

Ben Garnett is best known in bluegrass circles as the longtime guitarist with Missy Raines and Allegheny. But he’s also a rising star on the new acoustic music scene. It was while majoring in jazz guitar performance at North Texas University that Garnett discovered artists such as Tony Rice, the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and…

The Bay Ramblers were a San Fransisco Bay Area bluegrass band that performed for a couple of years in the mid-1980s at venues like Paul’s Saloon and the Grass Valley Bluegrass Festival.  Some of the shows at those two venues were recorded live, and Sandy Rothman, who was the banjo player in the band, has…