IBMA has been on our minds, and on this blog a lot recently. Most of that due to the recent World of Bluegrass event held in Nashville, TN recently. Some of the discussion of IBMA though has sprung from the controversy surrounding this year’s award show. Hit the tag for IBMA 2006 Awards above to see those posts. In light of all that attention I thought it might be a good idea to do a little run down of the Board of Directors, who they are, and who they represent.

Remember these people represent us, the membership of IBMA, and should be representing our desires and concerns on the issues the board faces. If you are concerned about the direction IBMA takes in the future, I would strongly urge you to consider joining the IBMA. If you are already a member, I would urge you to find the board member(s) that represent your portion of the industry, contact them and let them know your thoughts. I’m sure they all welcome and appreciate active participation from the membership.

The IBMA board consists of 16 members elected by the professional members of the organization. The board members are elected to 3 year terms on a staggered rotation so that only a limited number are up for election at once. Recently, 5 new board members where elected. The IBMA website describes the board and it’s duties as follows. (more…)

For your Sunday reading pleasure I’ve gathered up a couple links to articles that might be of interest. Here they are in no particular order.

Vince Gill - The Boston Globe has a nice 2 page story about Vince Gill’s new 4 disc set that includes one disc of accoustic and bluegrass music.

The Crooked Trail - The News & Observer has a story about Virginia’s Crooked Trail. Not a lot of bluegrass content, but since the trail does feature many bluegrass stopping points I thought it might be of interest.

Bluegrass in Greece - This is a new blog run by flatpicker Yiannis Gougourelas. He’s a good player, and writes very well. Oh, it is in english by the way.

The Washington Post had a short piece about Chris Thile’s new CD, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground, in it’s weekend edition. You can read it online here. It’s only a couple paragraphs but it’s great that Thile is garnering some attention for bluegrass music. After the phenomenal popularity of Nickel Creek, it’s encouraging to read comments like this for a more bluegrass oriented project.

These are terrific songs, and their rhythmic and narrative thrust focuses the leader’s talents as never before.

Mandolin Cafe is directing attention to a post in their forum, that was started last September. The post contains a whole bunch of vintage photos from bluegrass festivals. It’s great for scrolling through and saying things like “Wow!”, “Oh My!”, etc. I’ve only made it through the first couple of pages so far, but it’s incredible. There are pictures of everyone, including Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, Herschel Sizemore, and the list keeps going. If they were at a festival in 1967 - 1970 or so, there is probably a picture of them. Very cool.

Check it out here.

We posted back in August about Dale Ann Bradley’s newest release, Catch Tomorrow, when we first received a promo copy.

The hope we expressed at the time was that now, at long last, this extremely talented vocalist and expressive song stylist may finally have all the pieces in place to make a lasting mark on the music world. With a new (aggressive) label, and first rate material top to bottom, Catch Tomorrow may be capable of generating the attention this verstatile artist deserves.

The CD has been available at Dale Ann’s shows for several months, and from her web site, but has just shipped to stores this week. Look for it wherever you prefer to purchase bluegrass music, on the Compass Records site, or in Apple’s iTunes Music Store where you can hear audio samples as well.

You can also hear Dale Ann discuss a number of the songs from the new CD - and give an interesting overview of her bluegrass career (including the New Coon Creek Girls) - in her recent GrassCast interview.

Just a quick update to our mention earlier this week about the birth of Hogan Wayne Benson, whose parents Wayne and Kristin Benson are well known to bluegrass fans.

There is a hospital photo of young master Benson up on Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time’s web site.

Listen now: (IE users click to activate)

This episode of The GrassCast features an interview with Frank Solivan II. Frank plays in the Navy band Country Current. He performs on mandolin and fiddle when the band is doing bluegrass and also plays electric guitar in the country version of the band. In the interview Frank and I discuss the Navy band, what their mission is, what is it was like to audition for the band, and the bluegrass component of what the band does.

In addition to playing in the Navy band, Frank also has two solo CDs out. The latest one, Selfish Tears, came out late this summer. Frank and I talk about the CD and specificially we discuss, and preview, three of the songs on the disc. We also brush on Franks other obsession, cooking. Check out the photos in the enhanced version of the podcast (see iTunes link below), I’m gonna have to eat dinner at his place one of these days!

Direct Download: ep48_frank_solivan_ii.mp3

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One of the events we discussed here on The Bluegrass Blog during IBMA week in Nashville last month was Jerry Douglas’ Keynote Address to the organization on September 25.

As I mentioned in that post:

His address seemed to focus on three basic themes: bluegrass music is in good shape, it is being noticed by the larger music industry, and we ought to be willing to share it with those outside our circle.

IBMA has obtained Jerry’s permission to make the entire address available online, and we heartily commend it to our readers. It is entitled What Does Playing Bluegrass for 30 Years Do for You, and it can be found on the IBMA web site.

I just got a note from my friends over at Pantheon Guitars that they have built their 4,000th guitar in the Bourgeois line. It is a very beautiful Brazilian and Adirondcack DS-260 with Style 42 Abalone top border. Dana Bourgeois sprays all the sunbursts himself and this guitar was no exception.

The brand was started in 1993 with serial #000001. Now, 13 years later, they have reached #004000. Bourgeois now builds around 400 guitars per year and each one of them looks and sounds great. Just catch a Ricky Skaggs show and see/hear them in action.

This milestone guitar has already been purchased by Jere Cherryholmes. If you want a milestone guitar like this I guess you’ll have to wait a couple years and try and grab #5000 when it’s made!

Bourgeois #4000	The shop crew	Bonnie Lloyd

It’s a fair bet that many of our US readers were, at one point in their life, readers of the popular children’s books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. If not, odds are that they watched episodes of the equally popular television series based on the books, Little House On The Prairie.

Dale Cockrell, a professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has founded a company to make the many traditional American songs and tunes mentioned in the Little House books available as sound recordings for modern readers. He is assisted in this work by Nashville mandolinist, producer and Sound Art Recordings president, Butch Baldassari. The company is called Pa’s Fiddle, and the second of ten audio CDs with this theme is due for release on November 14.

This new project is entitled, Arkansas Traveler: Music from Little House on the Prairie, and it includes 18 songs and tunes mentioned in the Wilder books. Credited performers include Mac Wiseman, Riders In The Sky, John Cowan, Bob Carlin, Butch Baldassari, Alison Brown and many others.

Arkansas Traveler will not ship to stores until next month, but it can be ordered online now from Pa’s Fiddle, where audio samples can also be heard online.

The first release in this Ingalls series, Happy Land, has been added to the We The People Bookshelf by the National Endowment For The Humanities. This program delivers a set of age-appropriate classic books to several thousand libraries around the US to foster the reading of great children’s literature. Happy Land was added as a bonus to their fourth NEH Bookshelf program, a collection of literature with The Pursuit Of Happiness as its theme.

I posted last week about a video that our pal Wichita Rutherford put up as a podcast (and in his blog). The video was recorded for and played at IBMA last month. In the video Wichita is playing cards with the guys from Three Ring Circle and tries out his Ricky Skaggs impression on them. It was bit to “Kraussy” so the guys said. Well here is a new video in which Wichita makes another attempt at imitating Skaggs. Watch it and see what you think.

Gibson has made a brief video lesson from Sonny Osborne available on their web site. It is taken from his Homespun DVD, The Bluegrass Banjo of Sonny Osborne, and has him demonstrating his solo for Sunny Side Of The Mountain.

The video clip runs about a minute and a half, and a tab for the song is presented on the Gibson site along with the video.

Mandolin Cafe has published a press release from Gibson that promises more online lessons from Gibson artists, but it isn’t clear whether there will be any new content, or simply video and tab samples from commercially available DVD releases.

When AcuTab’s book of Herschel Sizemore mandolin transcriptions went out of print earlier this year, the company had no plans for a reprint. Though the book had found an appreciative audience with serious students of bluegrass mandolin, declining book sales for their tab books had led AcuTab to focus their efforts on DVD releases, one of which is a Sizemore instructional video.

When Joe Vest, who manages Gibson’s retail operation in the Opry Mills shopping center in Nashville, voiced his interest in keeping the book available in their store, plans were revisited and a reprint was ordered. AcuTab announced this week that the Sizemore transcription book is available once again.

The book contains exact transcriptions (tab and standard notation) for 30 Sizemore mandolin solos, taken from 13 tunes he has recorded on his solo projects. The songs were taken from his Back In Business and My Style CDs, and include such classics as Rebecca, Amandolina and Grey Eagle.

More details can be found on the AcuTab web site.

We just received news of the arrival of Hogan Wayne Benson, who was born on October 6, 2006. His parents are Kristin Scott Benson, banjo picker with Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time, and Wayne Benson, mandolinist with The John Cowan Band.

If ever a child was born with an impeccable bluegrass pedigree, young Hogan may be the one. Our most sincere congratulations go out to Kristin and Wayne, who we trust will be as exceptional as parents as they have been on stage and in the studio.

The recent IBMA Awards Show in Nashville resulted in some controversy surrounding the performance of some patriotic material performed by the US Navy Band, Country Current. You’ll find all the details in our previous posts here and here. There is also a very popular post in The B on the topic.

While the controversy had its beginning on sites and email lists dedicated to bluegrass music, the story has now moved into the larger blogosphere. Following coverage in The Tennessean over the weekend, it has now been picked up by sites that don’t normally dedicate much, if any, time to covering bluegrass. Predictibly these bloggers have all taken a stand on the issues involved.

The US Navy Bluegrass band asked not to play service anthems? What was IBMA thinking?

The Sheep’s Crib

…if all 300 international members are offended because the IBMA’s annual event has an American patriotic theme, TOO BAD!

Vanishing American

IBMA, keep PC and leftist politics out of bluegrass

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When I profiled Lefty’s Old Guitar, the new release from J.D. Crowe & The New South yesterday, I mentioned that no audio samples had yet turned up online.

The Rounder site still has no audio, but samples are now available in iTunes. If you have the iTunes software installed, you can hear a snippet from all 12 tracks in the iTunes Music Store.

Original Country Radio Network, previous owner of 24/7 online bluegrass outlet WorldWideBluegrass.com, has folded operation. Ownership and operation of WWB has been undertaken by Gracie Muldoon, who functioned as both an on-air host and station manager while the streaming radio station was under the OCRN umbrella.

The site (and the audio stream) was only down for a little over 24 hours, and Muldoon reports that she received only 30 minutes notice from the previous owners that everything was about to be shut down - just two days after returning from a week in Nashville promoting the site and the stream at the IBMA convention.

“I was given enough time to go ‘on air’ and make an announcement, and I determined right then, that after 1 solid year of growing our bluegrass community at the WWB - I was not going to ‘not come back.’  For the last 12 months here, I had done all the work - and I was angry - so I set out on a mission.

I purchased new encoders/streams/software and we’ve gone with the same reliable server. We’ve also purchased a new chat room through ivocalize.com - though we had several places offer to donate one - and we used one of our broadcaster’s rooms for about 2 days just to regroup our ‘regulars’ and tell them we weren’t going down. They ran out (on the web) and started posting we are still HERE!

It’s been an real learning experience - but one we actually ended up growing from… and all the DJs and myself are actually giddy about being independent now and away from OCRN, and its management - which no longer exists.”

WorldWideBluegrass.com is run by an all-volunteer staff of hosts, and offers their audio stream for both high speed and dial up connections.

Porter Wagoner may not be among the names that come to mind when you think of bluegrass music, but he has recently produced a recording of bluegrass and Gospel by his former duet partner, Christie Lynn. The CD, Christie Lynn Sings Country, Gospel & Bluegrass on Gusto Records, features Lynn on a dozen cuts with such guest vocalists as Dolly Parton, Ralph Stanley and Wagoner himself.

The tracks also features some of bluegrass music’s most celebrated sidemen, with contributions from Bryan Sutton, James Alan Shelton, Ronnie McCoury, Rob Ickes and Mark Fain.

This is actually the second project Wagoner has produced for Christie Lynn, but the first, Dixie Girl, was a private pressing sold only at her live appearances. Her background has included performing in a variety of stylistic forms, from old time country to southern rock, and it was a conversation with Wagoner that got her started thinking about releasing a bluegrass/acoustic recording.

There are a few audio samples up on the Gusto Records site - a loop that plays through a number of the tracks, starting with Wagoner’s song, Bluegrass Boogie.

This latest release from J.D. Crowe & The New South has been so long in coming that guitarist, vocalist and emcee Ricky Wasson had taken to joking on stage that he wasn’t going to even suggest when it was due out any longer. Fans would know it was available when they saw it on the table.

It has been quite some time since the tracks were recorded and the CD’s release (10/10), owing to concerns about mixing, re-mixing and such technical issues, but all that is moot now, and fans will indeed see it on the table at New South shows, and wherever they purchase bluegrass music.

I had a chance to listen to the CD over the weekend, and one thing in particular stood out. This may seem like a celebration of the obvious, but bear with me: Lefty’s Old Guitar sounds precisely like a recording from J.D. Crowe & The New South. From the choice of material to the arrangements and the performances, this project sounds like there have been no changes in the way bluegrass music is played since Crowe redefined the genre in 1975 with his classic Rounder 0044 album - and that’s not a complaint.

It’s all there: Crowe’s silky banjo playing, with his always-imaginative backup; the two lead vocalists, one a deep baritone and the other a soaring tenor; virtuouso performances all around; a mix of uptempo songs and thoughtful ballads. There’s even one trademark Crowe ending featuring the familiar sort of mildly jarring, unexpected chord change we have heard from them so many times in the past.

Lefty’s Old Guitar features the current New South lineup: Ricky Wasson on guitar and vocal, Dwight McCall on mandolin and vocal, Ron Stewart on fiddle, Harold Nixon on bass, and Crowe on banjo and vocal.

Unfortunately, I could not turn up any audio samples yet online, even on the Rounder, New South and Amazon sites. Nor does it show up yet in Apple’s iTunes Music Store. We’ll keep an eye out, and post an update when some audio samples turn up, as they are sure to do shortly after the official release date hits tomorrow.

UPDATE: Lefty’s Old Guitar is now available in the iTunes Music Store.