Wayne Benson

Mountain Home Music Company is set to release another single tomorrow from its Bluegrass at the Crossroads project, a band scramble sort of recording where members of various bands and solo artists are grouped into unexpected ensembles. They have intentionally

One positive side of quarantining is time to work on new projects, and that is what Russell Moore & IIIrd Tyme Out’s Wayne Benson has been doing. He just introduced his own YouTube channel, Wayne’s World of Mandolin. “A few years

North Carolina banjo picker, Clinton Joyner, 92, of Concord, NC, passed away on April 12. Joyner first started picking banjo two-finger style in the 1930s, learning on his daddy’s second hand banjo. Around a decade later, he heard Earl Scruggs play

Some bluegrass folks are just meant to sing together: Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent. Dale Ann Bradley and Steve Gulley. And a seemingly endless string of brothers, from the Delmores to the Gibsons. Add to that list Dave Adkins and Edgar

Among the bluegrass celebrities we caught up with last week in Raleigh were Russell Moore and Wayne Benson from IIIrd Tyme Out. We talked about Timeless Hits From The Past, Bluegrassed, their current album with Cracker Barrel, and how working

Bluegrass is one of the few genres of music in which instrumental skill is showcased just as much or more than vocal skill. As such, many of the best known tunes in bluegrass are instrumentals, made for showing off a

It almost goes without saying. Put two of the preeminent bluegrass mandolinists of the past 20 years together in the studio, along with a crack rhythm section, and you're sure to get something memorable tracked. And so it is with The

The long-awaited twin mandolin project from Wayne Benson and Alan Bibey, The Mandolin Chronicles, has been announced for a March 12 release on Pinecastle. It celebrates not only these two stellar musicians, but also the classic prewar instruments they each

North Carolina fiddler Tim Smith has released a new album, titled simply Fiddler Tim Smith & Friends. Smith has quite a bluegrass pedigree, having worked for three years with The Bluegrass Cardinals, and with five previous solo projects to his credit.

My friend Stacy Grubb, a West Virginia singer-songwriter, sometimes muses that her music is too bluegrass for country and too country for bluegrass. That’s a perfect description for Pure & Simple, the first solo release from Robert Hale, the former