We’ve just made it through Thanksgiving, and I chose the phrase "made it through" deliberately. Let's be honest, for all people's happy and thankful social media posts ("I'm so thankful for my kitty Snooky-wookums, and the humans in my family
Author: Chris Jones
From The Side of the Road… using bluegrass to deflect difficult Thanksgiving conversations
I want to wish you and yours a very happy Thanksgiving. Mine is a simple one: I'm up in the frozen north of western Canada, where Thanksgiving was last month. I'll be eating a pizza and filling in for other
From The Side of the Road… are banjo players a moon sign?
I've become very disillusioned with the zodiac, I have to admit. First there were the overly general daily horoscopes: "Make sound financial decisions today. Expect news from a friend, family member, or other human being you may or may not
From The Side of the Road… have I got a theme for you!
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
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