Author: Chris Jones

I’m certainly not up on every music trend, and certainly not every entertainment headline grabs my attention. We live, after all, in a world of too much information (“Bob Dylan’s goldfish ‘Henry’ dies of natural causes”), but this one definitely

No one likes negativity except those who dish it out, and even those people only like their own negativity. I also hate to be negative on the last Wednesday of May, because you know the old saying, “He who is

The Memorial Day weekend is sort of a milestone in the year. It’s the unofficial start of summer. The fashion people also tell us it’s now okay to wear white shoes (lime green leisure suit optional). Canada celebrates a long weekend

I received a promotional email from a publicist (not a “for-your-consideration-vote-for-me-in-the-first-round” email, not that there’s anything wrong with that) that had a wonderful detail in it that I almost missed: it was a music business job title that was nothing

The first ballot for the IBMA awards has gone out. Did you receive a “for your consideration” mass e-mail from me or one of my surrogates? I hope not, because I didn’t send one (not that I wouldn’t love to

Last week here, we discussed what careers might be appropriate for a professional bluegrass musician who has taken the daring and rare step of actually retiring. It should be noted that the few bluegrass musicians who do quit the business tend

Is there possible gainful employment after being a professional bluegrass musician most of your life? I realize it’s a question that very few full time bluegrass pros ever ask, because they almost never retire. Sometimes they stop working, but that’s not

Even if I’ve seemed dazed and/or confused by the origins of some of the songs we sing, I was nonetheless thrilled to recently discover a whole set of prequels to some of these traditional standards. They were collected by the

Though I respect people who chose this profession, I’m glad I never became an ethnomusicologist. For one thing, it’s a non-German word with seven syllables (one more than “paleontologist” or “mandolin-playing-guy”), and that requires a permit to use, which I’ve

It seems like so long ago now, back before the time change, even, that I wrote a little article here on bluegrass haiku. Some loved it, others hated it, but almost everyone had some kind of reaction to the hyper-condensed