John Lawless and Terry Herd with their Distinguished Achievement Award from IBMA – photo © Irene Kelley
I received an email this week from a reader we’ll call “Mr. Jim,” who is in his late 80s. It was a very nice and very short note asking where he could find a copy of Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue on CD. He isn’t set up to pay for things electronically, so he needed to be able to mail somebody a check and get the CD the old-fashioned way. His problem was that he didn’t know of anybody who still operated that way anymore.
My first thought was just to log on to Amazon. Nope. You can’t mail those guys a check. Then instinct kicked in: County Sales. Of course! Except County Sales closed its doors in 2024, something we wrote about here in Bluegrass Today. And that got me thinking about how much has changed.
Then another realization hit me. Just a few weeks ago marked 30 years since I moved to Nashville, and today marks 15 years since the launch of Bluegrass Today. It’s true what they say: your perception of time really does speed up as you get older.
Fifteen years today of Bluegrass Today. So, if you’ll indulge me for just a few minutes, I’d like to take you on a short ride through time, back to the beginning of the publication you found your way to today to read this article.
My partner John Lawless and I knew of each other, but had never met personally when he launched The Bluegrass Blog with Brance Gillihan in 2005. To benchmark that year personally, I was in my fifth year with Sirius Satellite Radio as creator and format manager of its bluegrass channel, while continuing to host my own syndicated radio show, Into The Blue, which launched in 1992.
Following my departure from Sirius in 2006, I had a chance meeting with John and Brance in Nashville. I was keenly aware of what they were doing with The Bluegrass Blog and was quite intrigued. Nothing was discussed at that meeting about doing anything together, but it was the catalyst that got the wheels turning in my mind about broadening the media opportunities available to bluegrass fans.
Then, in the summer of 2010, I distinctly remember walking into the Apple store at the Green Hills Mall in Nashville and seeing an iPad for the first time. There was a news app on it, and when I picked the thing up and rotated it, the publication automatically reformatted itself to fit portrait mode. I turned it back to landscape and everything instantly adjusted again. That seems ridiculously ordinary today, but at the time I stood there staring at it in breathless amazement. In that 30-second moment, something clicked: bluegrass fans need something like this, just for us.
It crystallized a vision. Thinking back to my meeting with John and Brance about a year and a half earlier, I knew these were the guys I wanted to be part of the adventure with. I soon learned Brance already had his sights set on pursuing a life in the ministry, so John and I began discussing the concept of consolidating our careers, experience, and investment capital into launching what would become Bluegrass Today. Within a year, we had the infrastructure built, historical stories from The Bluegrass Blog imported, and the new format ready to go.
On September 23, 2011, we launched.
We barely had time to celebrate because the IBMA World of Bluegrass was opening in Nashville three days later. Anyone who has traveled to that event, and especially anyone who has ever set up a booth in the exhibit hall, knows what a massive undertaking it can be. We had been preparing for months to roll out this brand-new venture to the bluegrass industry and fans.
Then, on Thursday the 29th, as exhibitors were pouring into the hall and people were surrounding our booth with questions, curiosity, and interest, I received word that my father had unexpectedly passed away in Oregon. At the exact moment when everything surrounding Bluegrass Today was at its height of excitement, I received arguably the worst news of my life. Talk about bittersweet. Looking back on it now, I’m not exactly sure how I got through everything, but somehow I did. That was the beginning of Bluegrass Today, and it remains the memory that comes back in Technicolor as I write this 15 years later.
What we have now that we didn’t have then is the ability to look back on 15 years of history. Did we make the right decision going digital instead of print? Did we launch at the right time? Was the concept correct? Did the bluegrass community even care about another publication? Were we doing a good enough job giving readers what they wanted? And, perhaps most importantly at the time, would we survive? I won’t go into 100% detail here, but I think after 15 years the answer is pretty clear: yeah, the bluegrass community accepted us.
Of course, you don’t get through 15 years in the news business without screwing something up along the way, and one of my favorite stories involved our longtime correspondent David Morris, who once killed Sonny Osborne. No, not literally. David, who had already spent a long career as a serious journalist with places like The Associated Press and Bloomberg, wrote a review that referred to “the late Sonny Osborne.” There was only one problem: Sonny was still very much alive.
Somehow it slipped past our editorial eye and remained live for several hours before anyone caught it. I don’t know that there is a much worse nightmare for a journalist than accidentally announcing the death of somebody who hasn’t died, and when we realized what had happened, Lord help us all. We were scared to death of the pain and suffering that could be rendered upon us, not only by the bluegrass community, but by Sonny himself. A funny thought hit me later about what might have been the scariest thing David Morris had ever heard in his life: “Sonny Osborne, line 1.”
To our enormous relief, Sonny was quite humored by the whole thing and rarely failed to remind us afterward that he was, in fact, very much still alive. David has owned the mistake himself, once calling it perhaps the most boneheaded blunder in the history of our two sites. Years later, Sonny agreed to write a regular column for us called Ask Sonny Anything, and naturally the subject came up there as well when a reader asked him whether he really was dead. Ask Sonny Anything – You dead mon? Only Sonny could turn his own premature obituary into a running gag, and I miss him.
One of the things John and I were also in lockstep agreement on from the beginning was the concept of a bluegrass airplay chart compiled weekly from actual reported airplay spins. Fortunately, we found a large group of bluegrass DJs who were, and remain, willing to contribute their playlists to us every week. We are extremely grateful to each and every one of them. As a result of the work they do on radio and their willingness to share that information, those charts have become the gold standard in our industry and, after all these years, an extraordinary historical record of what bluegrass radio has actually played. You can see the full list of them here: Bluegrass Today broadcasters
John and I have shared a lot over the past 15 years. We’ve shared laughs, struggles, successes, worries, and personal loss. Sure, like brothers, we have had a few, shall we say, assertive, pointed discussions. But nothing that ever broke us apart. We are still just as committed to bringing you up-to-date news, features, reviews, chart data, and everything else we do in a way that helps keep this bluegrass community connected.
This article also wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a few of the key people who made all of this possible. In the beginning, Eric Tapp was instrumental in taking the concept and making it a digital reality. Down through the years, many correspondents have contributed countless stories, photographs, interviews, insight, and talent. There are too many names for me to start listing them without inevitably leaving somebody out, but you see their names in the credits every day, and their work is an enormous part of what Bluegrass Today is.
And then there is our amazing sales manager of more than a decade, Ashley Lewis, who has become the face and voice of Bluegrass Today’s advertising operation. You may have known Ashley first through her work as a bluegrass artist and bandleader, or perhaps you’ve read her DIY Bluegrass articles, or even seen one of her YouTube videos about building her own cottage in Tennessee. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, because that is essentially what all of us have done here. We’ve built a home for ourselves at Bluegrass Today. We’re family, and we appreciate the honor it is to play a role in the greater bluegrass community.
We’ve certainly had our challenges. We survived COVID and what it did to the music industry. We’ve watched CD sales give way to downloads, and downloads give way to streaming. Social media has completely changed the way people consume news and discover music. Technology has changed at a pace none of us could have imagined when I picked up that first iPad in the Green Hills Mall. And now artificial intelligence has arrived to shake everything up all over again. Through all of it, we’ve adapted, occasionally kicked and screamed, learned a few things the hard way, and kept going.
So on this anniversary, I want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way. Everyone who has read an article, clicked on an ad, purchased something from one of our sponsors, posted a comment on our Disqus page, sent us a news tip, bought an ad package, offered a suggestion, constructive criticism, correction, or simply a word of thanks. Thank you to our advertisers, our writers and photographers, our DJs, the artists and industry people who trust us with their stories, and everyone else who has played some role in keeping this thing moving for 15 years.
And, of course, thank you for taking the time to read this article and all the others we publish. Without you, we simply wouldn’t be here. Somewhere along the way, while we were busy documenting the history of bluegrass music and the people who make it, Bluegrass Today became a small part of that history itself. That is something I’m very proud of, and something none of us takes for granted.
So, happy 15th anniversary to Bluegrass Today, and a heartfelt toast to everyone who helped us get here. Now I need to get a response written to Mr. Jim, who is still wondering how in the world he can get a copy of Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue on CD by mailing somebody a check, just like he could when this ship set sail 15 years ago. Somehow, I’m going to find him one.
