Skip to content
No, Sync or Swym is not the latest single from IIIrd Tyme Out. Nor is it an old Welsh proverb. I just needed a title for this week’s Blue Yodel topic: sync rights. Wait! This is really fascinating stuff! I promise tales of lawyers, guns and money. And sex. Okay, no sex, but that’s just [...]
1: If Leigh were a soup and Eric a sandwich, what kind of soup and sandwich combo would you be? Leigh: Pea soup and bacon sandwich Eric: Tomato soup and bologna sandwich 2: What are your favorite 4-letter words? Leigh: Tony and Rice Eric: Earl and Bill 3: What would be the title [...]
This is the first in what I hope will be an occasional series of songwriting challenges to appear in the Blue Yodel column. In every songwriting workshop, one question always gets asked: which comes first, the words or the melody? I try hard not to reply, “The beer comes first.” It’s a reasonable question, but [...]
Every Saturday I take my mother two Reese’s cups. She lives in a residential care facility with four other ninety-somethings and a rotating cast of under-appreciated care providers. She often calls me by my father’s name, her father’s name, or her little brother’s name (who’s now 95), but I long ago stopped explaining my relationship [...]
Wanted: young band needed to take part in promotional experiment. Must be willing to risk loss of career and ridicule of peers. But if it works: You can become more famous than the Beatles! Okay, here’s the idea. Let’s say you’re an artist. That’s easy. There’s no license or education required to be an artist. [...]
Guest Questioner and Prize This month’s guest is a respected mover-and-shaker in bluegrass: the Yoda of Yellow Springs, the Doyen of Dayton, the Savonarola of Southern Ohio—Fred Bartenstein. Fred was the editor of Muleskinner News from 1969 to 1974, and has been a broadcaster, musician, festival MC and talent director, composer, record producer, compiler of [...]
Janet and I just got back from Sore Fingers Summer School, a bluegrass camp in the Cotswolds in England—affectionately dubbed by Tim O’Brien, Hillbilly Hogwarts. We taught a week-long class on bluegrass harmony to 30 Brits who spent their hard-earned pounds to be initiated into the mysteries of trio and quartet bluegrass singing—a skill, I [...]
The latest instructional DVD release from The Murphy Method is Harmony Singing Made Easy, featuring Bill Evans, Janet Beazley, and Chris Stuart along with Murphy Henry. Using some very familiar jam session standards - Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Bury Me Beneath the Willow, All the Good Times Are Past and Gone, Don’t This Road Look Rough [...]
Let me say up front that this article is not about a night I had on the dance floor in the 80s with the father of bluegrass. It’s about remembering lyrics, but would you have started reading something called “Fun with Memorization”? Last year I read a book on memory called Moonwalking with Einstein by [...]
I first saw banjoist Ned Luberecki on stage at an IBMA showcase back in the ‘90s. He made a joke that about ten people in the room got and I immediately bonded with him. It took several more decades for us to meet, though. We ran into each other in the year 2253 at a [...]
