Today is Cyber Monday, the day that robots everywhere break Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and take over the world. But while that’s happening, let’s shop! You may have already done your shopping on Black Friday (which started this year
Funny stuff
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Chris Jones – Reader Mail
It seems that I have again stirred up a firestorm of controversy with the last two or three columns about certain kinds of private engagements. I guess if I’m honest it’s more of a smoldering campfire of controversy than a
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Blue Yodel #53 – Dictionary of Bluegrass Slang
This is Blue Yodel #53, the same number of times that local bluegrass band The Remington Riders of Free Dirt, Texas, played their signature song, Remington Ride, at a wedding on November 19, 1995. It was band policy to play
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ARU – Acronyms R Us
It occurred to me that while I was sounding off about types of gigs that bluegrass bands should avoid, I was perhaps giving the impression I was trying to exclude whole categories of work for a bluegrass band, with no
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No go zones for bluegrass bands
After my recent column about bar gigs, I suggested that, though we all enjoy complaining about them, they’re still worthwhile venues for certain kinds of bands. But are there other kinds of gigs that bluegrass bands sometimes play that they really
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Blue Yodel #52 – White House Blues
This is Blue Yodel #52, the same as the world-record number of strings broken by the band High Wind Advisory the night of December 5, 1983 in Delphi Plains, Ohio, when they attempted a bluegrass version of the rock opera, Tommy. I
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Notes from the bar birds
I wasn’t really expecting this, but last week’s column about playing in bars prompted an unusual amount of emails and questions on the subject. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but having done my share of bar gigs in
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Bar gigs… gotta love ’em!
When road musicians get together, reminiscing about gigs past is a pretty typical sort of conversation. There can be fond memories of the festival with the extraordinary scenery, the theatre with the great sound and near-perfect acoustics, or maybe the
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Blue Yodel #50 – Product Placement in Bluegrass
One of the words people use in describing bluegrass is integrity. Even accounting for a few posers, let’s say on the integrity scale of 100, bluegrass is a 95. Before we start celebrating, let’s consider that on the income scale bluegrass
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Road games for bluegrass musicians
The road can be dreary. This fact struck a deep and resonant chord with me again recently while driving between West Memphis, Arkansas and Cape Girardeau, Missouri en route to a show in southern Illinois. The following description has many slight variations,