From The Side of the Road… fact checking bluegrass classics
Welcome to the Election Week edition of this column. There will be no endorsing of candidates for office (that’s best left to daily newspapers with editorial boards like the Washington Post), political jokes, or misinformation about polling places or times, but I will be doing something we’ve all come to enjoy during the seemingly endless […]
From The Side of the Road… Halloween bluegrass classics
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 announce the titles: Pretty Little Widow, Farewell Blues, and Don’t Make Me Go Through With […]
From The Side of the Road… simplified sloganeering
We’re in an election year, and if you’re just now hearing about that, I’d like to hang out wherever you do, maybe forever. What this means here in October of 2024 is that absolutely nothing about anything will be even slightly understated. Nothing is “good,” “bad,” or “somewhat promising”; it’s “the greatest thing ever,” or […]
From The Side of the Road… band contracts 101
I’m taking this week off to recover from the stress of taking the previous week off. Therefore, I’ve asked John Lawless to rerun a slightly edited version (I changed one “the” to an “a”) of a column I wrote a few years ago about artist contracts: Artists, and bluegrass musicians often (though not always) fall […]
From The Side of the Road… returning to “normalcy” after WOB
Dateline: Raleigh. That’s the last time I’m likely to be writing that, at least at the end of September. I think we’re all feeling a few pangs of sadness about the IBMA World of Bluegrass leaving here, but there’s also optimism and excitement about Chattanooga, what with its choo-choo, its aquarium, its dog, etc. Have […]
From The Side of the Road… healthy training for World of Bluegrass
The very first column I wrote for Bluegrass Today was about maintaining your health during the stressful IBMA World of Bluegrass week. Most of the advice I gave was either discredited or just laughed at, and not for the right reasons. I wasn’t surprised: health advice, like a bottle of multivitamins, has a very limited […]
From The Side of the Road… What if I’m wrong?
Is the rerunning of a column about bluegrass conspiracy theories a blatant attempt to cross-promote our new single, What if You’re Wrong? Perhaps, and there’s a whole conspiracy theory in itself with some pretty solid evidence to support it. Esquire magazine recently published a list of the top 30 conspiracy theories prevalent in the United […]
From The Side of the Road… A.I. and the bluegrass industry
It’s been a while since I’ve done a video column, but the time felt right. I promise it’s not just because the letter “B” doesn’t seem to be working right on my keyboard, although that certainly is a factor. Have you ever tried to write about bluegrass without that letter? You keep writing things like […]
From The Side of the Road… bluegrass plagiarism over the years
I read an interesting tale of the music business recently, in which an Edmonton music student and songwriter, Connor Shaw, claimed that a song he wrote was the basis for a recent number one song by country artist Jason Aldean, for which Shaw has received no credit, royalties, or even a fruit basket. The Aldean […]
From The Side of the Road… movie tag lines for bluegrass songs, Part Deux
Last week we discussed movie taglines, those one or two sentence teasers meant to entice us to rush out (or in) to see the film. As I said, they can range from the overly sparse: “An Event” (Earthquake), to the plot-spoiling line that says a little too much; “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the […]
