Opinion / Humor

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

I’m taking this week off to recover from the stress of taking the previous week off. Therefore I’ve asked John Lawless to rerun a slightly edited version (I changed one “the” to an “a”) of a column I wrote a

In many parts of our society, we place a high value on being positive. “Just stay positive,” we’re often told, even if we’ve just received the news that we have three months to live. Some countries are more positive than others,

I’ve recently had a few requests to revisit the bluegrass haiku, or at least to write a few more of them. The people making these requests have asked not to be identified; apparently there’s some shame connected with the bluegrass

‘Tis the summer festival and music camp season, and with that comes the workshop season. I thought of it because just today I was listing some of the potential workshops my band members and I might offer at a festival

This is a column normally devoted to tongue-in-cheek coverage of bluegrass topics, faux advice, and the occasional bluegrass haiku, but one day after the public funeral of Ralph Stanley, I’m not exactly feeling in that spirit. There’s been eloquent writing about