Opinion / Humor

I was always a fan of the Mad Libs game. It’s at least as good a time-killer on the road as eating sunflower seeds in the shell, or guessing how long various bluegrass side musicians will last in their respective

This will be a very brief report from your IBMA World of Bluegrass correspondent (or one of them, anyway). The reason this will be so brief will be obvious to anyone who’s ever attended this event. For those who haven’t, let

The very first column I wrote for Bluegrass Today was about maintaining your health during the stressful IBMA World of Bluegrass week. Most of the advice I gave was either discredited or just laughed at, and not for the right

This is the third and final part of a four-part series on description and categorization of music, and the challenges of counting the number of parts in a series. We had been discussing ways to describe your own music or band,

Last week, we discussed categorization of music, pro and con, and the inevitable subcategorization of it. It was my suggestion that, rather than resist it, as musicians long to do (“it’s just my music, man, you dig?”), we should embrace

Human beings love to classify things. That’s why we have a periodic table (at least I think we still have a periodic table). And, in 2016, human beings love to subdivide into ever more specialized subcategories. That’s why we have

I was in the recording studio for Mountain Home records all this past week, and sometime right before doing another take on our soon-to-be-released medley of I Did it My Way and Wagon Wheel (in German), Ty Gilpin remarked that

There’s plenty to worry about in the world of bluegrass, if you’re the worrying sort. Even those that aren’t the worrying sort can get that way in an election year, so let’s go ahead and worry. We have the issue of

A question has arisen in the last couple of weeks about a growing IBMA mystery: what on earth happened to the Special Awards? If you’re not familiar with them, those are the awards that are given out during the Special

Dateline: Parsons, WV Greetings from Pickin’ In Parsons. It’s a very busy touring week for me and the Night Drivers, with a schedule that will take us from Stony Plain, AB to Pemi Valley, NH, and points in between, so any