Author: Chris Jones

You may think of people who have chosen bluegrass music as a profession as fearless types who proceed boldly into the future without a care for their material comfort, or family and financial stability. Perhaps you’re correct about the financial

Greetings from Scotland, after just concluding our tour of Ireland.  It seems that every year someone somewhere is predicting the end of the world, and it’s usually fairly close to IBMA World of Bluegrass time. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Below

You’ll find that if you’re in the bluegrass music business for any length of time that things can and will occasionally go wrong. Mistakes will be made, sometimes through no fault of your own (but who are we kidding?). I’ve

Last week’s rerun of one of my bluegrass haiku columns was meant to serve as a handy setup for some new haiku I’ve decided to compose for this week. Most recently I had been concentrating on rewriting some of our best-loved

The following column was originally written during National Haiku Writing Month, which this month isn’t, but this month happens to be “National Declare a National Month For Something Month,” so let’s just go ahead and consider this National Haiku Writing

In these polarized political times (please hold your comments), a new acronym has sprung up to describe politicians who don’t quite tow the party line: RINO and DINO, short for Republican In Name Only, or Democrat In Name Only. This

We discussed bluegrass death last week, and if things followed along the expected timeline, this week should be all about the bluegrass afterlife. Instead, though, I’d like to back up to the part  just before death: bluegrass retirement. I know what

Well, it’s the heart of summer; it’s extremely hot in many places, and our thoughts turn naturally to death. This may seem a little morbid, but this is a column about bluegrass music, after all. Aside from the moment when

A while back (about as specific as I get now about past events), I wrote a column in which I substituted a line or two of current pop lyrics for the original lyrics of some bluegrass standards, just to see

I touched on this issue in the introduction to last week’s column rerun: people aren’t listening to the lyrics of bluegrass songs. By “people” I mean human beings, obviously, but specifically the people who are fans of bluegrass music, and