Articles

Mike Mitchell’s first album with Turnberry Records was released just before Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and the timing couldn’t have been an accident. Fathers & Sons is about family relationships and strikes more than one personal note. Mitchell, a native of Canada, lives and runs a music school in Floyd, Virginia, part of the…

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…

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,…

It’s fitting that the 50th anniversary project for Lost & Found is literally an album that’s been lost for more than a decade.  In 2013, the seminal group was working on a project for Mountain Fever Records when health issues for Allen Mills put the project on hold. The “lost” hard drive was recently found…

No Boundaries Photo by Russ Harrington She has been called a Renaissance woman and a trailblazer and Alison Brown’s groundbreaking accomplishments certainly live up to those claims. While she is widely known as a banjo player, calling her a banjo player is like calling Picasso just a painter.  Over the course of her distinguished career,…

Photo by Amy Richmond Michael Cleveland is a well-recognized bluegrass fiddle master. Originally from Henryville, Indiana, Cleveland was born completely blind. Later, a childhood ear infection caused him to lose 80% of his hearing in his left ear and some in his right. Even with this diminishment in hearing, to paraphrase Vince Gill, Cleveland hears better…