Author: Chris Jones

I’m in Scotland at the moment, and I’m taking a couple of Wednesdays off to clear my head and think of new jokes involving banjos, haggis, and curling. Meanwhile, though, during a recent seminar at the IBMA World of Bluegrass on

I addressed the issue of name-dropping early on in the life of this column. Bela said he was pretty happy with it, so I felt no need to follow up. Dan and Suzanne had also given it their stamp of

This is going to be brief, as I’m still in the throes of post-IBMA-World-of-Bluegrass/Wide-Open-Bluegrass fatigue syndrome (PIBMAWOBWOBFS, or “Pib-ma-wob-wob-fus”). I hid away for three days, eating nothing but buckwheat pancakes and ramen noodles (not together), watching baseball, and listening to

This is midweek of the IBMA World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, NC. I’m enjoying the week, possibly because my really hard day doesn’t come until Thursday, when I’ll be participating in a morning seminar (“Yoga on a moving bus: healthy

My very first column for Bluegrass Today was written right before the IBMA World of Bluegrass of 2011, held in Nashville. It contained some recommendations for maintaining your health during what can be a very stressful week. I would write something

The IBMA World of Bluegrass is fast approaching, and if you’re planning to attend, you probably still have plenty of questions you may be asking yourself. Let me just say up front that I have no informed answers to give, unless

Do you ever play the name games? I’m referring to the cute methods of generating your own alternate name for a specific occupation. For example, you can arrive at your stage name by combining your middle name with the name

Many people ask me (though I should say that I use a very broad definition of the word “many”) what performers do before a show to get mentally and perhaps spiritually prepared. How do they get in what is often

It’s been a while since we discussed the IBMA breakaway organization, the ABMA, which stands for the Argumentative Bluegrass Music Association. They formed a few years ago and built themselves on the principle that nothing advances our music more than

Some people have difficulty in the music field because they discover too late that they’re in the wrong side of the business for their personality. A person who is a wonderful sideman or woman may be a disaster as a