Ted Lehmann

When you attend a bluegrass event, whether it's a concert, festival, or local picking party, you never know who you might meet. Most people don't care who you are or what you do for a living. What they do care about is that you love the

There's a song by country-rock band Alabama with the lyric, “If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.” But I find that governing clause a little too narrow. In almost any genre of music, that most cranky and difficult of

The Dry Branch Fire Squad is celebrating its 40 anniversary on the road this year, and has played an important and illuminating role in bluegrass music for many years. The group's frontman, Ron Thomason, combines his usually gentle satirical humor with a song selection that relies heavily on

James King was a man with great musical talent and a voracious appetite for life. Those two things fed each other and helped him to emerge from the picker's field to become one of the most popular and beloved bluegrass singers, from his major recording debut in 1992

My wife and I have been traveling to bluegrass festivals up and down the East Coast, with occasional forays into the Midwest, for about a dozen years now. As we've come to know and value increasing numbers of musicians, there's one plaint we hear with increasing

Sylva, North Carolina, lies just short of 50 miles southwest of Asheville, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the western part of the state. It's a small town of around 2,500 people, the seat of Jackson County. It's the closest town to Western Carolina