The folks at Wechter Guitars have put together a video called Crafting Wechter Guitars, shot by award-winning photojournalist Mark Bugnaski. It is available for viewing (in two parts) on YouTube.

The video shows craftsmen at work in the Wechter shop, and is presented in a documentary style, without narration. It runs just over six minutes in total. There is also a Wechter slide show presentation on YouTube.

Wechter makes a variety of hand crafted acoustic guitars, as well as Scheerhorn-licensed resonator guitars and the Rob Ickes signature model Scheerhorn/Wechter guitar.

Eric and Leigh Gibson will return to The Bluegrass Guide’s Songwriter Chat on Monday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. (EDT).

This online chat forum is hosted monthly by Rick Lang, and is designed to give songwriters an opportunity to interact with successful bluegrass writers from the comfort of their computer screens.

There is no fee to participate, and only a very brief registration is required to join in.

You can find transcripts from previous Songwriter Chat sessions by scrolling to the bottom of The Bluegrass Guide Chat Room page.

The Gibson Brothers were also the featured artists in the 2007 print edition of The Bluegrass Guide, an annual listing of festivals and bluegrass events.

The latest issue of Flatpicking Guitar Magazine is now mailing to subscribers. This issue is Volume 11, Number 4 - May/June 2007. The cover story this time around is The Pioneers of Flatpicking. The pioneers of bluegrass guitar covered in this issue are (in no particular order):

• Edd Mayfield
• Maybelle Carter
• Riley Pucket
• George Shuffler
• Hank Snow
• Don Reno
• Delmore Brothers
• Jimmie Rodges
• Doc Addington

Yes, the folks at FGM are aware that not all these players used a flatpick.

Although not all of these early performers used a flatpick, they all certainly had a great influence on those of us who flatpick today.

The usual columnists are all on board providing lessons and tabs of tunes played by these pioneers. The entire issue is a great lesson in the history of bluegrass and flatpicking guitar.

Here’s a link to the subscription info.

We’ve talked at length on The Bluegrass Blog about the new CRB ruling that will increase the royalty rates for internet radio later this month. Now it seems that Congress has decided to get involved.

Late last month a bill was introduced into the House or Representatives by Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL). The bill is called The Internet Radio Equality Act (H.R. 2060), and would effectively reverse the CRB ruling.

According to the DiMA website, here is exactly what the bill would do:

The Internet Radio Equality Act would:

1. Annul the CRB decision and set royalty rates at 7.5% of revenues – the same rate that satellite radio pays – for 2006-2010
2. Change the rate-setting standard currently used by the CRB to determine Internet radio royalties, and substitute the standard that applies to most other statutory licenses, including satellite radio, jukeboxes and sound recordings

H.R. 2060 has gained the support of 63 cosponsors at this point, which is good support. The question is, will Congress be able to act quickly enough to save internet radio from the July 15th deadline? (more…)

IIIrd Tyme Out has just announced that mandolin player Wayne Benson will be returning to the band later this month. Wayne was in the band from 1992 to 2004. After leaving the band in 2004, Benson joined The John Cowan Band where he has been ever since. Benson now returns to IIIrd Tyme Out as Alan Perdue leaves to concentrate on two businesses that he owns.

We are sad to see Alan leave, and have cherished the time that we have gotten to play music with him, but are as equally excited to have Wayne re-joining the band.

Benson’s first show back with the band will be at Bass Mountain Park in Burlington, NC on May 25, 2007.

There will be a special bluegrass performance on this Friday’s (5/11) edition of The Blue Plate Special, at noon on WDVX. The show will feature a live (in-studio) set with Butch Baldassari (mandolin), Barbara Lamb (fiddle), Kathy Chiavola (guitar/vocal) and Mike Bub (bass).

While this bunch does not tour together regularly, they will occasionally do shows as The Nashville All-Stars, and have an appearance scheduled this weekend at the Earhart Music Festival in Bristol, TN.

Butch said that their show will include mostly standard bluegrass songs and fiddle tunes, and with the high level of musicianship in this group, you can expect it to be a strong set.

WDVX broadcasts at 89.9 FM from Knoxville, TN and the station’s feed is streamed live online. There are no audio archives, so be sure to listen in on Friday, eastern US time, from noon to 1:00 p.m.

Rural Rhythm Records has posted two music video performances and a video bio from Carrie Hassler & Hard Rain, featuring special guest Jim VanCleve on fiddle.

The videos (also available on YouTube) are for two tracks from her self-titled debut CD, and include Seven Miles From Wichita (currently #7 on the Bluegrass Unlimited Singles chart) and her latest single, Going On The Next Train.

The video bio has Carrie and the boys shopping for music in Nashville, and talking about their musical backgrounds - with comments from producer (and Mountain Heart fiddler) Jim VanCleve as well.

John wrote back in January and February about the faculty position opening at South Plains College due to the retirement of banjo teacher Alan Munde. I received a call the other day from Cary Banks the Creative Music Department head, asking me to pass along the news that the school is still accepting applications for that position.

South Plains College is dear to my heart as I spent 3 years there studying bluegrass music and recording technology. It is a wonderful atmosphere to work and study in, with great people on staff. I was profoundly affected by the influence of Alan Munde and Joe Carr while attending SPC.

Carry stressed to me on the phone that the main requirement they are looking for in an applicant is that they have “the heart of a teacher.” I remember from my days there that all the staff were genuinely concerned that the students learn, both in class and out.

If you are interested in the job please contact:

Joe Carr
Assistant Professor of Music
South Plains College, Levelland, TX 79336
(806) 894-9611 ext 2493
jcarr@southplainscollege.edu

Here’s an interesting story that I missed while I was out of town last week. CMT.com put up a nice feature last Wednesday on Nashville’s long-time bluegrass headquarters, The Station Inn.

Since the club first began promoting bluegrass shows in the early 1980s, it has been the unquestioned hot spot for bluegrass fans and artists in and around Nashville. Even mid week shows at the unassuming night spot can find well known bluegrass luminaries on stage, or in the audience.

“I had heard about that place as a kid, and I remember the first time I went — on a Sunday night,” says Alison Krauss. “I was 13, and all the pillars of that community were out that night. It’s the place where everybody wants to go play. I don’t even know how many times we’ve played it as a band, but it was a really big deal to get to play there.”

Read the full article at CMT.com.

Any time you head to Nashville, it’s worth checking The Station Inn calendar and heading over for a nosh and some tunes. You never know who you’ll see!

We have posted a number of times in the past few months about the new royalty rates for Internet radio established by the US Copyright Royalty Board. These new rates represent a dramatic increase in the royalties owed to both songwriters and performers for Internet music broadcasts, with artists welcoming the change and Internet broadcasters insisting that they will be the demise of the format.

On yesterday’s Tech Tuesday edition of The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU in Washington, DC, the discussion concerned this very issue. Guests included Kurt Hanson from the Radio and Internet Newsletter, John Simson from SoundExchange, Skip Pizzi from Microsoft Entertainment, Jason Oxman Vice-President of Communications for the Consumer Electronics Association and Jay Inslee, U.S. Representative for Washington State.

The discussion can be heard online on the WAMU web site, and should be of interest to anyone who has been following the debate about these new rates and what impact they might have on bluegrass radio online.

Rebel Records has reissued two more bluegrass classics as download only releases, available only from eMusic and iTunes. Both were originally released on LP in the early-to-mid 1970s.

Folks these days know Ricky Skaggs as a successful band leader, vocalist and mandolinist, but when That’s It was released in 1975, Skaggs was a journeyman bluegrass pro working for JD Crowe and The Country Gentlemen. The 12 tracks are mostly instrumental, with favorites like Red Apple Rag, Florida Blues and Sweet Georgia Brown included along with a few Skaggs vocals.

Joining Ricky on this record were Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Tom Gray and Ed Ferris on bass, Marc Pruett on banjo, and Terry Baucom on fiddle and guitar.

Audio samples can be found in the iTunes Music Store.

Roy McMillan & the High Country Boys were known for hard driving, original North Carolina bluegrass in the 1970s, and High Country was their debut release on Rebel. The 12 tracks were all written by band members, primarily Roy McMillan himself.

You can also find audio samples for High Country in iTunes.

Also recently re-released in digital form by Rebel, available from eMusic and iTunes, are these other classics:

This is the third in a series of articles about The New Music Business.

Before I undertook the writing of this series on music business I wrote about the decline of CD sales and mentioned a book called The Long Tail. I mentioned that book as an information resource to help you understand the way the internet is affecting the marketing and sales of CDs. I know there are objections to The Long Tail and I’ll discuss those in the next post, but here I want to review ideas contained in The Long Tail for those that haven’t read it.

Fist a definition. Wikipedia defines the statistical distribution feature known as the Long Tail, in this way.

In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off.”

Take a look at the image to the right. The Long Tail is represented by the yellow portion of the graph.

The book, The Long Tail, was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Anderson focusses on the long tail in the retail distribution world. He talks a lot about Amazon.com and Rhapsody (he didn’t have access to figures for iTunes). The basic idea is, the internet has changed the way people shop and interact with culture. Before the internet people only knew about music that was played by local bands or on their local radio, and was sold in their local record store. He describes this as a “world of scarcity” where retailers simply did not have enough shelf space to carry every recording that was available. The ones they did carry were the hits. The hits live on the left side of that curve. There are few of them and they sell a lot.

Our culture, and the marketplace, is changing though. (more…)

The latest release from Mike Marshall & Darol Anger, Woodshop, is released today on Adventure Music.

In addition to Anger on violins and Marshall on mandolins and guitar, the new project also features Phil Aaberg on piano, Aaron Johnston on percussion, and the round robin of Todd Phillips, Michael Manring and Todd Sickafoose on bass.

The premise of this recording, the first by this pair since 2002, was to revisit the format from their popular 1985 release, Chiaroscuro. All the music is instrumental, and was written by Anger or Marshall. It is far more structured than their free form duo shows, with multiple overdubs and a focus on sonic purity in their visions for this new music.

We weren’t able to find much info on the Adventure Music, Mike Marshall or Darol Anger sites, but Amazon has a complete set of audio clips with online ordering enabled.

The video is now up of the recent appearance by Special Consensus on Michael Jonathan’s Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour. Special C shared the bill with folk/country singer Elizabeth Cook, and performed songs from their upcoming Pinecastle CD, The Trail Of Aching Hearts, due for a May 15th release.

You can see the video from this show as a Windows Media Video.

Woodsongs airs every week on dozens of public and community radio stations all over the world, on XM Satellite Radio’s The Village, and via live video streaming from the show’s web site. Each episode is also maintained in their online archive, where you can watch the video, listen to the audio, or download the MP3 for each broadcast. Other recent shows that may be of interest to Bluegrass Blog readers include:

The Kruger Brothers and The Chocolate Drops
The Infamous Stringdusters and Martha Scanlan
Tony Joe White and Dale Ann Bradley
J.D. Crowe & New South
Chris Thile & How To Grow A Band
The John Cowan Band and E Muzeki
Tony Trischka and Crooked Still
Cindy Bullens and Uncle Earl

The International Bluegrass Music Museum quietly launched a new internet radio station the first of this month, but now they are making some noise about it.

RBI (Radio Bluegrass International), as it is called, is a non-commercial, 24-hour streaming internet broadcast available on the museum’s website. The stated goal of launching such a station is to

provide bluegrass news, classic tracks, new releases, disc reviews, in-studio performances, international recordings, archived radio shows from around the world, vintage vinyl, festival announcements, festival recordings, and museum news

Long range plans include adding forums, blogs, and calendars to the website as the station grows, including multi-lingual programs in the stream, updating the museum’s website to be multi-lingual, and streaming the audio and video recordings the museum has collected as part of the Video Oral History Program.

The museum has fully licensed the stream and will keep up with all royalties and licenses necessary. The new royalty rates for internet broadcast have been discussed at length here on The Bluegrass Blog and the museum’s solution should be of interest.

The station is currently live and free, in what the museum refers to as the “Open House” phase. But on July 5, 2007 the “Open House” ends and the stream will no longer be free. At that time RBI listeners will need to pay $4 per month to access the stream, while museum members will will receive unlimited access with their annual membership.

An official “Grand Opening” show will be broadcast Friday, May 18, at 7:30 AM EST. This particular show will be hosted by the museum’s Assistant Director Mike Lawing and engineer/program director Rob Calhoun.

NOTE: The stream is only available in a Windows Media format and is not compatible with Macintosh. Flip for Mac opened QT to play the stream but then told me the url was not valid. The museum has no plans at this time to offer the stream in any other format.

Back in the winter I told you about a book written by Christian rocker David Crowder along with his fiddle player Mike Hogan. I just finished reading it recently and thought I’d share about it for those that might be interested. The title of the book is Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven But Nobody Wants To Die, or (the eschatology of bluegrass). It’s that last part that might interest you. Eschatology is the part of theology that concerns itself with death and the final destiny of the soul. While that may seem like a weighty issue to tie to bluegrass music, it’s actually a natural fit.

UPDATE: Reader Mitch Finley (with an M.A. in Theology from Marquette University) wrote in to tell me that “Eschatology may also include the final destiny of all of creation, in addition to the study of death and final destiny of the soul…” Thanks Mitch!

The writing of the book seems to have stemmed from the pain and loss felt by Crowder and Hogan at the death of a close friend. The started exploring their own feelings about the subject and, being musicians, they started paying attention to how music dealt with it. Not surprisingly, they ended up with bluegrass music. Bluegrass is a music of the soul and deals with the tough issues of death, heartache, and loss, but does so in such a way as to put a smile on the face of musician and listener alike. Crowder and Hogan present a history of bluegrass music, beginning with the Scotch/Irish roots, and then delve into what they call the “paradoxes held within” the musical style.

how one of the most inherently emotive instruments on the planet can also be one of the most annoying, and how one of the most inherently annoying can at the same time be so freaking cool.

I’ll let you figure out which two instruments they are referring to.

The chapters switch back and forth between discussions on the scientific and religious understandings of the soul, and bluegrass music, it’s roots, it’s instruments, and it’s people. One of my favorite lines comes when they are describing the sound of the 5-string banjo. They comment that it produces loads of notes “coming your way at the speed of light in a single file line.”

Also interspersed throughout the book are IM sessions between the authors, and of course the columns. What, I haven’t told you about the columns yet? Well the columns…um…you’ll have to read it for yourself to figure those out.

The book is interesting in that it presents a layman’s history of bluegrass music and the human understanding of the soul, in a unique presentation that is spiced with just enough seriousness to be taken seriously and just enough humor to make such a difficult subject like death enjoyable to read about.

Continental Divide banjo picker Dale Perry is the most recent respected 5 string pro to sign on as a Huber Banjos endorser. He joins such top banjo players as Sammy Shelor, Jim Mills, Ron Block, Cia Cherryholmes, Jason Burleson and Greg Cahill on the Huber artist roster.

Dale selected a Huber Kalamazoo model, and has been using it on stage this past few weeks. His initial reactions to the new axe have been quite positive.

“This instrument is incredible!! It went from Steve Huber’s hands, into the case, back out of the case and in my hands playing on stage is the span of about 20 minutes. No set up, no tinkering… I just hooked up the strap and blasted off.

This banjo and sounds as much like a pre-war Mastertone as anything I have ever played.”

Find out more about the various Huber models on their web site, or see where to catch Dale and his new banjo on the David Parmley & Continental Divide schedule page.

Canadian banjo player Jayme Stone shared a series of banjo travelogues with our readers during his recent musical journey through West Africa. Jayme was traveling on a Chalmers Arts Fellowship grant to research the music of African musicians who perform on banjo-like instruments, and will embark soon on a recording based on these musical explorations.

Last week, The Toronto Star ran a brief feature on Jayme’s trip in which he capsulized some of what he learned in Mali. You can read the piece online on the Star web site.

You can read Jayme’s banjo travelogues here on The Bluegrass Blog.

Uncle Billy Dunbar, a host at WorldWideBluegrass.com will be “spinning” a tribute to the late Larry Rice on Thursday May 10, 2007.

Larry Rice was the mandolin playing brother of guitar hero Tony Rice. Larry passed away last year during the month of May so this tribute will mark the one year anniversary of his passing. The tribute will air from 4-6 PM EST, and can be streamed online from WorldWideBluegrass.com.

I will be featuring music from his Albums “Time Machine” released on LP in 1987 and “Hurricane & Dreams” released in 1987 also on LP, this album has been re-released recently. I will be doing commentary on his life and music.

This is the regular time slot for Dunbar’s show Country Unplugged Bluegrass Radio, but the entire show on thursday is being dedicated to this remembrance of Larry Rice. The chat room, on WorldWideBluegrass.com, will be dedicated to a discussion of Larry at that time and all are invited to join in.

Knoxnews.com has a feature article today about mandolinist/singer Paul Williams. The article presents a thorough biography of Williams’ music career, starting with his time spent in Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys and completing the story with Williams’ current band, The Victory Trio.

Paul Williams is an icon in this music having influenced many with his singing and mandolin playing. He is also a successful songwriter.

His songs have been recorded by Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams Jr., Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, IIIrd Tyme Out and many other artists. Even Ray Charles recorded “Nobody Cares,” a song Williams wrote in the early 1950s.

The article does spend considerable time discussing Williams’ Christian faith and testimony, which can’t be avoided when spending any time around Paul. It’s an interesting story and worth reading on a Sunday afternoon.