Opinion / Humor

Music camp season is fast approaching. Do you have your camp outfits picked out (usually T-shirts from other camps) and washed yet? Do you have enough strings? Have you enrolled? In a typical music camp of any kind, there are the

Mr. Bluegrass Manners has been absent for quite a while, working on his forthcoming book, Advance and Retreat - A Guide to Appropriate Fan-to-Artist Distancing. We did persuade him to return, however, to take some questions that have been simmering

Greetings from the big city of New York. I'm here paying a visit to SiriusXM studios. Shortly I'm heading to Chicago to play with the Night Drivers on Friday, and on to Murphysboro, Illinois on Saturday. In short, I'm busy,

Next week there’s going to be a long overdue new Mr. Bluegrass Manners column, so to get you in the mood, we're rerunning one from 2020 this week. Not just any one, though; this is the first MBM column after

Sequels are so often disappointing, Santa Clause 2 being a notable exception. Speaking of holiday classics, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol 2: The Next Verse ,wasn’t bad either. If you recall, Scrooge becomes the manager of the Cratchit family band and

The David Mayfield Parade - photo © Itamar Gat David Mayfield has always walked to the beat of his own drum. Though he grew up playing in an easy-going family bluegrass band, Mayfield has created his own niche in the genre

I addressed the issue of name-dropping early on in the life of this column. Béla said he was pretty happy with it, so I felt no need to follow up. Dan and Suzanne had also given it their stamp of

We haven’t discussed haiku much lately, and I'm not sure with all that's going on in the country and the world, if anyone has noticed. You'll just have to trust me on this. Haiku, for those who've missed all the earlier

We sometimes exaggerate in bluegrass music as a way of compensating for the fact that we aren't generally playing music for a mass market audience. And, even though most of us actually like that smaller-scale community feel of our music

Some time ago, I proposed a video game for songwriters that would allow them to experience simulated hardships to enable them to write soulful songs without having to actually experience the heartbreak and tragedy that usually feeds that kind of