Author: Chris Jones

Merry Christmas, all! This one is going to be short; I’m surrounded by people wearing festive sweaters, and someone just handed me a cup of egg nog. Note: for anyone concerned that I’m drinking at this hour (it’s 6:00 a.m.

Bluegrass bands face an annual challenge at this festive time of the year. And no, I don’t mean the challenge of coming up with money to buy gifts when your band isn’t working at all.  Though it is a traditional time

Are you a fan of Christmas movies produced by that company we usually associate with greeting cards? I’ll admit up front that while they may not suit my own taste in movies exactly, I have to admire how prolific the

We’ve just made it through Thanksgiving, and I chose the phrase “made it through” deliberately. Let’s be honest, for all people’s happy and thankful social media posts (“I’m so thankful for my kitty Snooky-wookums, and the humans in my family

I have often suggested that you can name an instrumental anything. You’re not restricted by lyrical content, and in our music we only occasionally choose titles that reflect a feeling evoked by the melody. So yes, anything goes. I usually

“I like the rules. I think you know how I feel about that.” – Fake Santa in Santa Clause 2 In the 1970s, once bluegrass music had evolved into its own genre, with its own festival circuit, its own record labels,

We live in an era of almost constant self-promotion across multiple platforms. We also live in an era of hackers, fat-free cheesecake, and the use of the word “platform.” In short, it may not be the best of times, but

Usually at the end of the year, or sometimes at the beginning of the year, or now and then in the middle somewhere, I provide a summary of the year’s least interesting stories in the world of bluegrass music. It

A longtime friend of mine in Austin, TX, mandolinist Paul Glasse, recently posted in social media about his professor dad having fostered in him the habit of looking up words he didn’t know or wasn’t sure of, in order to

I realized that after last week’s bro-country, four-writer co-writing session produced that moving alternate version of White Dove (I didn’t say how it moved you, or what it moved you to do, just that it was moving), you may have