Author: Richard Thompson

One of the many wonderful facets of Merlefest is the various competitions that take place each year during the festival. Firstly, there is the annual Chris Austin Songwriting Contest in which there are four categories. This year's winners are Love Gone By

Jeff & Shari Easter, the Lewis Family and the Easter Brothers were the proud winners of both Dove Awards in the bluegrass category at a ceremony at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, on Thursday evening (4/23). They took the

The May/June edition of Bluegrass Music Profiles helped to fill the mail box this past Saturday morning. This latest edition of the glossy bi-monthly magazine has as its main feature a six-page, wide-ranging profile of that prolific bluegrass song writing duo

Steve Martin's The Crow: New Songs for the Five String Banjo, hitherto available exclusively on Amazon.com will be released on the Rounder Records label on May 19. (Cat. No. 0647) The Rounder CD will have one extra track - a remixed

Johnny Warren and Charlie Cushman will mark the release of the new CD A Tribute To Fiddlin' Paul Warren with a special show at the Station Inn in Nashville on Saturday, May 2. The CD features Johnny Warren playing a superb

Piedmont Folk Legacies, who puts on the annual Charlie Poole Music Festival in North Carolina, has recently announced the acquisition of premises which will eventually house a National Banjo Center in Eden, NC. The two buildings involved, both former textile mills

This post is part of our occasional feature, Songwriter Profiles. If you have a suggestion for a bluegrass songwriter we might want to consider, please contact us. John Pennell started playing bluegrass in Arizona while he was in school at Arizona

One of the television attractions for April is the PBS documentary series Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People. The four-part series begins on April 9 and continues on each subsequent Thursday until the end of the month. Already released (on

The DC Bluegrass Union has announced plans to hold the first-ever DC Bluegrass Festival in Spring 2010. The announcement and the unveiling of the DC Bluegrass Festival logo was the focal point of the 1st annual DCBU Fundraiser Gala where, following

Sky TV introduced a new channel to its satellite service in the Europe earlier this month with the addition of Rural TV, the international dimension of RFD-TV, which was founded to provide 24-hour TV for rural America. The station, which features