Articles

At a recent concert, after her sound check, bluegrass veteran Murphy Henry heard music over the house speakers that stopped her in her tracks. Bewildered, she was hearing one of her original songs being sung by the Queen of Bluegrass Rhonda Vincent. Running through her mental bluegrass database, there was no notion found anywhere in…

Photos By Chris A. Courogen Paul Beard hasn’t always made squareneck resonator guitars. It just sort of seems that way to him after almost 40 years doing it.  “I’ve been doing this for so long,” says Beard, who built his first one in 1985, after a peak at the insides of the second hand OMI…

Not much time passes before there’s a fresh musical salute to one or another of bluegrass’s founding figures. These tributes not only strengthen and reaffirm bluegrass’s crucial links to its past, they also seem to provide a subtle moral compass in terms of reinforcing the music’s integrity with each new generation of musicians. Along those…

Published by MOC Press Mark O’Connor has written an emotional detailed account of his experience as a child musician. He first started on guitar as a six year old and began learning fiddle at age eleven.  He was a quick learner and at age twelve he won first place in the Junior Division at The…

This here’s a mighty fine tribute to the legendary John Hartford. It is arranged and played by Chris Coole on banjo and John Showman on fiddle. The Canadian duo have picked twelve of their favorite Hartford tunes spanning over thirty years of his career, including cuts from Hartford’s Mark Twang, Aereo-Plain and Good Old Boys…

Tim Stafford and Thomm Jutz have delivered us a real gem here. Lost Voices is an album over a hundred years in the making, spun of tales that are distant, yet closely connected. It is a record that has traveled the land through mountains and heart worn highways of America. With the exception of the…