From The Side of the Road… Mr Bluegrass Manners does COVID
Next week there’s going to be a long overdue new Mr. Bluegrass Manners column, so to get you in the mood, we’re rerunning one from 2020 this week. Not just any one, though; this is the first MBM column after the infamous COVID-19 pandemic had struck us in March of 2020. This five-year anniversary brings […]
From The Side of the Road… should there be bluegrass sequels?
Sequels are so often disappointing, Santa Clause 2 being a notable exception. Speaking of holiday classics, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol 2: The Next Verse ,wasn’t bad either. If you recall, Scrooge becomes the manager of the Cratchit family band and together––with a little help from St. Nick––they put on a benefit concert to save the […]
From The Side of the Road… drop a name, enhance your status
I addressed the issue of name-dropping early on in the life of this column. Béla 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 approval (as you may recall, Dan was executive director of the IBMA at the time). […]
From The Side of the Road… Flatt & Scruggs Haiku!
We haven’t discussed haiku much lately, and I’m not sure with all that’s going on in the country and the world, if anyone has noticed. You’ll just have to trust me on this. Haiku, for those who’ve missed all the earlier columns or skipped class that day in your Japanese Lit 301 class, is a […]
From The Side of the Road… bluegrass band phrase book
We sometimes exaggerate in bluegrass music as a way of compensating for the fact that we aren’t generally playing music for a mass market audience. And, even though most of us actually like that smaller-scale community feel of our music scene, we still like to put a bigger, and what we may feel is a […]
From The Side of the Road… dive bar bluegrass pinball machine
Some time ago, I proposed a video game for songwriters that would allow them to experience simulated hardships to enable them to write soulful songs without having to actually experience the heartbreak and tragedy that usually feeds that kind of art. It occurred to me, though, as I was in a Buffalo bar playing an […]
From The Side of the Road… can AI do bluegrass humor?
AI is here to stay, and is gunning for every one of our jobs. White collar jobs, that is, in the broader category of “indoor work, no heavy lifting” kinds of employment. The jobs especially at risk are the ones that everyone thought were immune from the kind of replacement that has already decimated industrial […]
From The Side of the Road… what is success to a bluegrass artist?
How do we define “success” in the bluegrass music business? We certainly can’t do it by the standards used in the mass market music world, where success is considered to have been achieved when you own your own airplane and can no longer appear in public places. In other words, you’re a success when your […]
From The Side of the Road… Auditions, part 1
If you’re playing bluegrass music professionally, or even semi-professionally, at some point you’re going to have to endure that dreaded pre-hiring ritual called the audition. Mind you I don’t mean to assume that everyone will go through the process of being a side musician first before becoming a band leader. Some go straight to the […]
From The Side of the Road… the curse of the bluegrass prequel
It’s always exciting when new research sheds some light on the mysterious origins of some of the songs we sing, and the stories behind them. I was particularly thrilled, then, when a number of “prequels” to some of our beloved standards were uncovered. These previously unknown tales were collected by the renowned ethnomusicologist Dr. William […]
