Opinion / Humor

Somewhere deep in my file of road stories, I have an unpleasant recollection of spreading out a sleeping bag on the ground behind a truckstop in the former Yugoslavia (because there was no room at the inn), surrounded by empty

Greetings from the road. My family and I are en route from Alberta to Nashville before we head to Morganton, NC. For that reason, we're pulling one out of the archives about bluegrass conspiracy theories. Bear in mind that this

People have lately been asking me to explain the hierarchy of bluegrass music (and by “people,” I mean my cousin Jimmy). Other than knowing that Bill Monroe is “The Father of Bluegrass,” I had to admit that I hadn’t given

Recently we discussed bluegrass urban legends, but it has since come to my attention that we have a lot bigger things to worry about, and no, I’m not talking about the worrisome deflation of banjo strap prices due to cheap

We’ve all been the recipient of urban legends or scams at one time, forwarded to us by email. In one of my early posts here, I passed along one in which an African prince had a Lloyd Loar and a

Last week we attempted to blame bluegrass music’s violent side on one man: Little Willie, the Scapegoat, we’ll call him. It works as a theory too, because without all the girlfriendicide (the technical term) committed by Willie, bluegrass songs would

A Bluegrass Junction listener—we’ll call her “Laura” (because that was her name)—emailed me recently, pointing out that there are an awful lot of bluegrass songs in which women are murdered. After much thought and reflection, I gave her this subtly

Is it “Mon-ROE” or “MUN-roe”? Is how we pronounce bluegrass names important? It probably is, yet it’s not always as simple as it might seem. Do we pronounce people’s names the way they would pronounce them themselves, or do we

I’m on a flight across North America right now, the second of three legs of my trip home from our recent European tour. This seemed like a good time to write this column, because for one thing the deadline is

Greetings from Prague, in the Czech Republic, where our European tour is starting this week. Before I go on to much less serious and important subjects, I want to acknowledge a big loss in bluegrass music, especially for northeastern bluegrass fans: