Opinion / Humor

During the past week, I received responses, both positive and negative, to last week’s column featuring Mr. Bluegrass Manners. Here are a few of the highlights, with the third one being my personal favorite, so make sure to read all

I’m pleased to announce the return of Mr. Bluegrass Manners. It had been my hope that he would be on hand to take questions more often, but he has spent all spring semester lecturing at the newly opened School of

The death of Pete Goble represents a huge loss in modern bluegrass songwriting. In fact, I’ll be paying tribute to him during my upcoming “Truegrass” show on Friday. Pete wrote countless great songs, mostly with various co-writers, often the late

Someone recently suggested to me that bluegrass music is every bit as violent as uncensored hip hop, especially towards women, and that bluegrass recordings should have parental warning stickers on them. I replied that I thought that was ridiculous. How

Sometimes late at night, in a fit of writer’s insecurity, I fear that almost no one reads this column, or if they do, they’re just skimming it without retaining any of its valuable information. This in turn leads me to

Greetings from Scotland! I’ve been on a short music tour/family vacation here and in Ireland, and I’m now getting set to fly to Chicago in the morning. I was the only driver among us willing and able to drive a

A while back, I wrote a two-part series on bluegrass dream analysis. Since that time, for whatever reason, I’ve had almost no bluegrass-related dreams. Perhaps I had gotten them out of my system. In the last year, most of my

As someone who landed his first full time bluegrass employment thanks to a classified ad, I continue to take an interest in this kind of advertising. Not to be voyeuristic, but the personals section has always been pretty interesting, too;

While in Nashville this week, i was listening to a songwriter being interviewed on the radio, and he confessed that he relies heavily on his smartphone for recording and storing song ideas. He said he didn’t know what he’d do

It’s IBMA Awards voting season, and some changes in the process have already been announced for 2019 by the IBMA board of directors. Most are minor procedural changes that may not be terribly interesting to most members (they weren’t even