Author: John Lawless

Roger Siminoff's Straight Up Strings has announced Elderly Instruments as the exclusive online retailer for their new banjo and mandolin string sets. These are the sets that Roger designed to ensure that each string - or set of pairs for mandolin -

Sparta is the city in Central Tennessee closest to where bluegrass legend Lester Flatt was born in 1914. Located 95 miles east of Nashville, it remains a small southern town with a population of around 5,000 people, and they are plenty

After eight and a half years of broadcasting bluegrass 24/7 online, WorldWideBluegrass.com has ceased operation. General Manager Jeff DeFord tells us that they shut down effective November 1, and that most of their regular hosts are moving their shows over

During World of Bluegrass last month we took the opportunity to chat with The Davidson Brothers, who were in Raleigh as an official invited Showcase act. The boys travel from their native Australia to the USA every year or so,

Danny Arms, who played mandolin with Carl Story in the latter years of Carl's career, died October 14 in Charlotte, NC after a brief illness. He was 48 years old. Arms was a serious student of bluegrass and pre-bluegrass music and

John Mailander is the latest bright light in the fiddle world to emerge from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he has studied under the tutelage of Darol Anger and developed into an adventurous and extremely capable player. His

Banjo player Simon Mitchinson has launched a new web site offering free backing tracks for bluegrass musicians who need a resource for practicing their instruments. At present he has 72 jam favorites posted, mostly banjo and fiddle tunes, in a variety

Students of bluegrass, country and old time music are generally agreed that the Bristol Sessions in 1927 served as the Big Bang of hillbilly music, the spark that ignited the popularity of what we now call the traditional mountain sound.

Compass Records has announced January 13, 2015 as the release date for Before The Sun Goes Down, the upcoming CD from Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley. It's a fun album, that mixes hard driving bluegrass with classic country based around Trey's

When I ran into the Gold sisters at World of Bluegrass last month, I mentioned that I hadn't seen much from their group, Gold Heart, in a while. But they had been out there touring, and said that they had just