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“Play it like it was wrote, boys,” Bill Monroe said. “We never verbalized about an arrangement and the only requirement for a song to be in the band repertoire was that one person could perform it all the way through.” John Hartford said. John who?The Father of Newgrass. The

There is a valley deep in the Cumberland mountains of Eastern Kentucky where, during the early part of the 20th century, no radio signal could reach. In the 1920's the people had no other resource than to sing the songs taught to them by their ancestors who had

If Amanda Shires is the perfect example of writing what you know, there just might be a box set equivalent of James Joyce’s greatest hits waiting just around the corner. Now the transplanted Texan fiddler who’s writing up a storm these days in Nashville might admit that’s

Every time I sit down to write one of these kinds of things I worry that I sound pretentious because so many other people knew the departed so much better than me.  I wasn’t close to Bob Reuter, I wasn’t an expert on his life, and this isn’

Before there was Americana, there was "alt country." A term I am still fond of and still has some relevance, if only for being one of Americana's sub-genres. I have long pondered its genesis, its development, its emergence, i.e., when did alt country begin or,