From The Side of the Road… do your children still believe in Bill Monroe?
Happy post-Christmas/pre-NewYear. I’m spending the holidays in a somewhat remote area of western Canada, where it was necessary to write and send this column in late November, to allow time for it to be delivered by dog sled (with some of the dogs on strike), then carrier Snowbird, then snowmobile, then truck, then plane, then […]
From The Side of the Road… Scrooge and the Christmas ghost
Last year around this time, we ran a rerun of my reimagined Stave Two of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge is actually a cheap, arrogant, and thoroughly disliked bluegrass band leader. I thought it would be appropriate, then, if this year we reran the sequel which was based on Stave Three, which […]
From The Side of the Road… Christmas romance is in the air!
As promised last week, here are this year’s Hallmark bluegrass Christmas movie plot proposals. As in past years, these are cast using a combination of well-established Hallmark Christmas movie actors and bluegrass artists: Christmas at Wildwood Flower Farms Financially-driven Boston event planner Stelara McKamey (Claire Lynch) feels she doesn’t have time for […]
From The Side of the Road… It’s Hallmark Christmas time!
We’ve all been waiting months for the Hallmark Christmas movies to start (okay, maybe eliminate “all” from that opening phrase), which just shows we haven’t been paying attention because they’ve been going since October 17. There have been reruns running throughout the year, of course, but it’s the new ones we’re concerning ourselves with, and […]
From The Side of the Road… start some new traditions at Christmas this year
There are lots of things we need to be careful of in the holiday season, like making sure we remember where we parked in a crowded shopping mall lot, or making sure not to leave gluten-free cookies out for Santa Claus (St. Nick is on record as being very pro-gluten and extremely pro-carb). One big […]
From The Side of the Road… personal ads for bluegrass musicians
There’s been an exciting new development at Bluegrass Today. I think it’s even bigger than the recent breaking of the personnel change story that rocked the industry: “Brian Hampton to Kryspy Rydge.” It may even be bigger than the installation of the new water cooler at BT Towers in North Carolina: Bluegrass Today will soon […]
From the Side of the Road… Why can’t I pee?
Whenever you search something or ask a question of the Almighty Internet gods (whose names are Pete and Roscoe) on your computer, the usual procedure is to type a question in the search bar at the top of your internet browser. Have you ever paid attention to the choices that come up when you begin […]
From The Side of the Road… Hold What’cha Got
I’m sitting in a hospital bed in Germany after an unfortunate fall on some stairs that left me with broken ribs and a ruptured spleen, but quite a bit of time. This was during a tour, and naturally I had to cancel all the remaining shows and rearrange flights home, which I’m working on today, […]
Chris Jones suffers bad fall on tour in Germany
Chris Jones, peripatetic world traveler, radio host, and regular columnist here at Bluegrass Today, has been on tour in Europe with Paolo Ercoli this past few weeks, set to return home at the end of this one. But it seems that he has been pretty seriously injured in Germany, based on this report he has […]
From The Side of the Road… are you the Vladimir Putin of Bluegrass?
I was recently sent a press release about a song that claimed it’s the “Hotel California of bluegrass” (because you can never leave?), and it got me thinking about these kinds of comparisons: “The American Pie of Bluegrass,” “The Mick Jagger of Bluegrass,” “The Don King of Bluegrass” (for a festival promoter), etc. There’s no […]
