• International Man of Bluegrass

    I’m writing this from an airplane heading west back to North America after a short European tour. Since the flight is 9 hours long, I finished watching a mediocre movie over an hour ago, the seatbelt sign has been on

  • Listen up, sound guys

    Last week, based on comments I received here and elsewhere, it seems that I suddenly became the best friend of sound engineers, simply by making an attempt to tell their side of the story. Now, could I get just a

  • The sound man is your friend

    There are plenty of tense and troubled relationships in professional bluegrass music. Minor scraps to major feuds can often develop between label and artist, artist and event producer, side musician and band leader, musician and landlord, but one of the

  • The Bluegrass Intelligencer returns

    After a hiatus of more than two years, The Bluegrass Intelligencer has arisen like a phoenix from the ashes of a bad metaphor. This hilarious site, which features parody, satire and inside humor for fans of bluegrass and acoustic music, is

  • Blue Yodel #27 – Make the Web Go Away

    Wanted: young band needed to take part in promotional experiment. Must be willing to risk loss of career and ridicule of peers. But if it works: You can become more famous than the Beatles! Okay, here’s the idea. Let’s say you’re an

  • Seemed like a good idea at the time

    The world of music is strewn with the decaying corpses of marketing ideas gone wrong, or ones that were just wrong to begin with. Many of them linger in our consciousness decades later, and not in a good way, providing

  • The Dogs of Bluegrass

    With dog talk seemingly taking over the US Presidential race, it seems like a perfect time to highlight this clever piece of work from Zach White. Zach is a country/bluegrass musician currently studying commercial music at Belmont University, where he performs with

  • Bluegrass to English translations

    People that are new to bluegrass music sometimes need some help in translating our jargon. Hearing that someone is “tearing it up on the five” may sound like ordinary and recognizable information to us, but to the uninitiated, it’s not