Opinion / Humor

This is it: the home stretch of the holiday shopping season is upon us. If you're reading this when it first hit the Bluegrass Today front page on Wednesday (morning edition), there are five more shopping days until Christmas, counting

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

It's that time of year again: time for the annual Hallmark barrage of Christmas movies. In fact, it's been that time of year since October. By the time we hit the fourth Sunday in Advent, Hallmark will have fixed up

Whatever the future makeup of the IBMA Board of Directors might be in an ideal world (heaven), whether it have 16 members or 5 members, whether it be human, or run by AI bots who play a little banjo on

This being the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, you would naturally be expecting a Thanksgiving-y column, perhaps a list of bluegrass things to be thankful for, e.g. "I'm thankful for my Blue Chip TPR 45," or "I'm thankful for Jimmy Martin's lead

One of the most important cliche phrases of the current decade, aside from "drink the Kool-aid," "going forward,"  and, from the world of television news: "at the end of the day," is "there's an app for that." We now have

I know I sometimes struggle when I'm having to field questions like, "do you really wish Raleigh would be less supportive of the IBMA?" or "do you really believe Bill Monroe died in 1981 and was represented by Monroe body

You'll find that if you're in the bluegrass music business for any length of time, things can and will occasionally go wrong. Mistakes will be made, sometimes through no fault of your own (but who are we kidding?). I've found

I’ve discussed in past columns the fact that, while bluegrass bands still get booked at weddings, there are at most three appropriate bluegrass songs to play at a wedding. Even some of the instrumentals are questionable, at least if you

Perhaps it was the approach of Halloween, or perhaps the post-IBMA World of Bluegrass mental fatigue, but my mind has suddenly turned to the macabre.  More specifically I've begun thinking about the writing on headstones. Epitaphs are often fascinating, sometimes horrifying,