Chris Jones

Happy post-Christmas/pre-NewYear. I'm spending the holidays in a somewhat remote area of western Canada, where it was necessary to write and send this column in late November, to allow time for it to be delivered by dog sled (with some

I  want to wish you a very merry Christmas coming up this weekend. This is the long-awaited (by almost no one) follow-up to a Christmas Carol-inspired column that ran several years ago about a modern day bluegrass Scrooge, a grouchy,

You can consider this a companion piece to John Lawless' recent article about artificial intelligence and Richard Melling's use of the technology in interviews about bluegrass music. This was just an odd coincidence since I was working on this AI-themed

You know how Christmas traditions get started: just do anything two years in a row, whether it's using a draw system for family gifts or poisoning yourself with expired egg nog, and you're forever obligated to repeat the procedure annually

Are you possibly old enough to remember cigarette advertising on TV and radio? If so you probably also still refer to David Grier as "Lamar Grier's boy," and you might remember who Gerald Ford's vice president was (also Lamar Grier,

Happy Thanksgiving! This week we celebrate something-or-other that happened on Plymouth Rock in such-and-such a year (and they say history isn't being taught well enough in our schools!), the existence of the domesticated turkey, and the growers of cranberries (also

We live in a time of wholesome claims being made about food products. We see words like "organic," "fair trade," and "sustainable," and we're meant to be impressed by these, even if we're not exactly sure what those terms actually

Occasionally in this column we've decided to do song title mashups, blending some of our bluegrass standards with titles of other well-known songs. When we did this with '70s and '80s pop hits, we came up with songs like "Rocket

We sometimes exaggerate in bluegrass music as a way of compensating for the fact that we aren't generally playing music for a mass market audience. And, even though most of us actually like that smaller-scale community feel of our music

Mr. Bluegrass Manners is back! I requested that he take some questions this week, while I’m still on a European tour, possibly writing from a Spanish jail (a nice one, though). As always, these questions came via my Facebook page and are