Author: John Lawless

Mountain Heart's new lead guitarist, Jake Stargel, had quite a first gig with the band yesterday. Right out of the gate, he was on stage with Tony Rice at Red, White & Bluegrass in North Carolina. Here's some video from yesterday's

The singing Bankester Family will be featured on today's (7/2) edition of Blue Plate Special on WDVX. The show originates from Knoxville and airs at noon (EDT). You catch hear it over the air at 102.9 FM, or online at

And speaking of Dick Spottswood... His biography of seminal banjo picker and bandleader Wade Mainer is due out from the University Press of Mississippi in the next few weeks. Banjo on the Mountain - Wade Mainer's First Hundred Years tells the

Dick Spottswood is celebrating 25 years of The Dick Spottswood Show on WAMU this month. He actually started playing bluegrass on WAMU in 1967 with a half-hour show that station management viewed as experimental programming. This was shortly after he participated

Early last month we reported that banjo picker Jim Mills was leaving Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, a job he had held for the past 14 years. The move came as a shock to a lot of Skaggs/Mills fans, and

A number of Hollywood blogs are drawing attention today to the development of a Bill Monroe film biography, which The Wrap describes as a "low-budget, 'Walk the Line'-type project." The reports we have seen are a bit on the gossippy side,

One of my favorite stylistic hybrids is the successful merging of old time and bluegrass music. And by successful, I more than offhanded references to another tradition, or the grassification of an old timey song or tune. It's not easy to

I've been watching the musical career of Darrell Webb for many a year. He first popped up on my radar as the mandolinist/tenor singer with Lonesome River Band in 1994, hired as the "replacement" for Dan Tyminski when he departed

Mountain Heart has announced that Jake Stargel has joined the band on guitar, filling the spot just vacated by Clay Jones. Jake is a fiery flatpicker from Georgia who at 19 years of age has already developed quite a reputation in

Fitzmaurice is a talented young band from Maryland fronted by twin sisters Maria and Sarah Fitzmaurice. They have been performing regionally for the past 3 1/2 years, and have just released a debut, self-titled CD. Their sound - and their original