MLB.com, the official site of Major League Baseball, has noticed the theme of The Gibson Brothers’ recent Sugar Hill release. The title track, Iron & Diamonds, tells an autobiographical story of where the brothers grew up in Lyon Mountain, NY where pretty much everyone was involved in mining – and town baseball.

In a story by staff writer Doug Miller, the Gibsons are interviewed about the album, and growing up in a baseball tradition.

Eric and Leigh both played for the Lyon Mountain Miners out of high school and witnessed a juggernaut of a team, a perennial league championship contender with some serious Major League ties.

The local Kowalowski family, for example, had several players on the team, including Tom, who was signed by the Yankees, although he never made it to the Major Leagues.

“He coached my team and had tons of stories,” Eric says. “Like getting to catch Whitey Ford and hitting a home run off Don Drysdale, who yelled at him and knocked him down the next time he was up.”

Eric says there’s a local legend that the Yankees tried to get in touch with a few other Kowalowski boys for tryouts, but the mining company got the letter and never gave it to them.

“I don’t know how true that is,” Eric says, “but it’s still a good story.”

The article also makes note of how Bill Monroe was a great baseball fan, and how Eric and Leigh make a point to catch as many major league games as they can during teh summer touring season.

You can read the full piece at MLB.com.

I had a chance to speak today with Jessica Lovell, the fiddling third of the sibling trio, The Lovell Sisters. She was making final preparations to leave for their European tour, which begins this Sunday (8/31) in Norway.

We talked in some detail about what the three young ladies have been doing for the past year or so, and got an answer to the question they have been hearing from their fans for the past two years… “When are you guys going to have a new CD out?”

The only studio recording they have released came in 2005 (When Forever Rolls Around), not long after they won the National Teen Talent Competition on Prairie Home Companion, and only a short time after the three of them embraced bluegrass music, leaving their classical studies behind.

Big things have happened for the girls since then, and their sound has matured as their professional life has expanded. A new album seemed like an obvious next step after being invited to showcase at IBMA in the fall of 2006, and by the middle of 2007, Jessica said that it looked like all their hopes were about to be fulfilled.

“We were working with a manager who was shopping us to labels in Nashville, and we had met with five of them who were serious about signing us. After a lot of thought and discussion, we decided to sign with Lyric Street Records, which is a division of Disney.

They had paired us up with producer Mark Bright, and everything seemed perfect. Mark had just finished producing Carrie Underwood, so we knew he could work well with female artists, and he had previously produced Mountain Heart, so we knew he was great with bluegrass and acoustic instruments.”

As they got closer to start recording, they started to get nervous about the direction things were taking. It was becoming clear that the label had chosen a path and a sound for the Lovells, and that the artist’s input wasn’t a high priority.

“It really hit me when Mark Bright mentioned one day that when he worked with Rascal Flatts, the biggest problem he had was convincing them not to record any of their original material. That hit me hard, as we wanted to do exactly that!

I don’t mean any disrespect to Mark or Lyric Street. They were great to us and treated us very fairly. It just started to look like we were heading into a place where we would lose control over our music.” (more…)

Del McCoury has always been hip to the younger crowd, and it seems he’s staying that way. While fans download and trade bootlegs of live recordings, many artists see this as detracting from their CD sales. Other industry people see it as stealing from songwriters who deserve a royalty for such recordings. Del has decided this situation isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity.

McCoury has just announced the launch of the McCoury Music Club. It works like this. Fans pay $100 for a 12 month (if paid in full up front, you get 2 extra months for free) membership to the site. The membership benefits include one live show download each month. This amounts to $7 or $8 per show, depending on how you choose to pay for the membership. This looks like a win all the way around. That’s not a bad price for a recording, the band gets paid, and I’m assuming the songwriters will as well.

The site is promising that most shows will be from recordings made within 60 days of the upload, with the occasional archival show being offered. It also promises to reward members with extra tracks, and even exclusive studio tracks from time to time. McCoury Music Club members will be the first to hear songs from a new box set scheduled for release a few months from now.

Don’t want to pay for a membership? Don’t worry. McCoury is also planning to offer individual shows for sale to non-members. This won’t happen for a few more months, but it’s coming. If more than one show is made available during any month, members will have to pay to download the additional concert. The member price will be discounted from the non-member though.

Another feature of the site that I noticed was a non-working button that reads “Give The Club“. This button is located just under the “Subscribe To The Club” button, and appears as though you will be able to purchase a club membership as a gift at some point in the near future.

This is an exciting new business model for a bluegrass band to adopt. I like the approach, but only time will tell if it works.