Articles

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…

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…

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…

For many of us with a fascination with both the tonalities and the designs of vintage instruments, a visit to a place like Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, with its collection of guitar rarities, is like to a visit to the Louvre in Paris or the Boston Institute of Fine Arts. In a virtual sense, this…

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…