Author: Chris Jones

Dateline: Parsons, WV Greetings from Pickin’ In Parsons. It’s a very busy touring week for me and the Night Drivers, with a schedule that will take us from Stony Plain, AB to Pemi Valley, NH, and points in between, so any

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

In many parts of our society, we place a high value on being positive. “Just stay positive,” we’re often told, even if we’ve just received the news that we have three months to live. Some countries are more positive than others,

I’ve recently had a few requests to revisit the bluegrass haiku, or at least to write a few more of them. The people making these requests have asked not to be identified; apparently there’s some shame connected with the bluegrass

‘Tis the summer festival and music camp season, and with that comes the workshop season. I thought of it because just today I was listing some of the potential workshops my band members and I might offer at a festival

This is a column normally devoted to tongue-in-cheek coverage of bluegrass topics, faux advice, and the occasional bluegrass haiku, but one day after the public funeral of Ralph Stanley, I’m not exactly feeling in that spirit. There’s been eloquent writing about

There are just a few days left in IBMA second round voting, and some things have surprised me this time around: One is how few “for your consideration” solicitation emails I’ve actually received. Perhaps I’ve dropped off of mailing lists, and

If you follow the bluegrass church calendar at all, you know this week is known as the Feast of the Second Ballot. It’s a time when believers are urged to shun many of their usual worldly activities and spend the

We’re all adjusting to a world in which recordings and other music projects are being funded in new ways. Even established artists recording for established record labels are now using fan-driven funding campaigns to finance their work. This can either

I have to say, as objectively as I can, that one of the things I like best about satellite radio is the display that tells us what artist we’re listening to, and what the song title is. This technology has