Greetings from Germany, where I'm on tour playing some duo shows with Paolo Ercoli. On Friday of this week (3:00 p.m. Eastern), the classic bluegrass show I do for SiriusXM, Truegrass, will be broadcast from the tour and will feature classic bluegrass
Author: Chris Jones
From The Side of the Road… German bluegrass phrasebook
Greetings from Italy, where I'm starting a tour this week with Italian dobro player Paolo Ercoli. Since I am writing in from Europe, I thought I'd address one potential issue on European tours, and that is the language barrier (revised
From The Side of the Road… fact checking bluegrass classics
Welcome to the Election Week edition of this column. There will be no endorsing of candidates for office (that's best left to daily newspapers with editorial boards like the Washington Post), political jokes, or misinformation about polling places or times,
From The Side of the Road… Halloween bluegrass classics
I've discussed in past columns the fact that, while bluegrass bands still get booked at weddings, there are at most three appropriate bluegrass songs to play at a wedding. Even some of the instrumentals are questionable, at least if you
From The Side of the Road… death at a bluegrass festival
This column was mostly written in September of 2021, after playing our first festival in front of real people since the start of the pandemic. It was at Thomas Point Beach. It felt so good to be back on a non-virtual
From The Side of the Road… simplified sloganeering
We're in an election year, and if you're just now hearing about that, I'd like to hang out wherever you do, maybe forever. What this means here in October of 2024 is that absolutely nothing about anything will be even
From The Side of the Road… band contracts 101
I'm taking this week off to recover from the stress of taking the previous week off. Therefore, I've asked John Lawless to rerun a slightly edited version (I changed one "the" to an "a") of a column I wrote a
From The Side of the Road… returning to “normalcy” after WOB
Dateline: Raleigh. That’s the last time I'm likely to be writing that, at least at the end of September. I think we're all feeling a few pangs of sadness about the IBMA World of Bluegrass leaving here, but there's also
From The Side of the Road… healthy training for World of Bluegrass
The very first column I wrote for Bluegrass Today was about maintaining your health during the stressful IBMA World of Bluegrass week. Most of the advice I gave was either discredited or just laughed at, and not for the right
From The Side of the Road… What if I’m wrong?
Is the rerunning of a column about bluegrass conspiracy theories a blatant attempt to cross-promote our new single, What if You're Wrong? Perhaps, and there's a whole conspiracy theory in itself with some pretty solid evidence to support it. Esquire magazine