We told you last fall about the new theme song for the IBMA Awards Show, The Road From Rosine, which debuted in October ‘07 at the show in Nashville.

The song was written by Mountain Heart fiddler Jim VanCleve at the request of the Awards Show producers, Terry Herd and Cindy Sinclair, and recorded for the show by the folks at Rural Rhythm Records for the occasion. At the time, it was indicated that the song might be included on a future VanCleve solo project, but it was not available for online listening or purchase.

Well, it is now. Rural Rhythm has released The Road From Rosine as a single on iTunes. The track features Van Cleve on fiddle, Ron Stewart on banjo, Clay Hess on guitar, Andy Hall on dobro, Adam Steffey on mandolin and Jason Moore on bass.

Visit the iTunes Music Store to give it a listen or get the download for yourself.

This inspriring story was written by the Rev. Belle Mickelson. She is an Episcopal minister who runs Dancing with the Spirit, an organization which teaches bluegrass to youngsters in the native villages of Alaska and Canada - and which could use the support of the wider bluegrass community.

Yesterday was the big Christmas Concert and dinner at Arctic Village School. Kids played fiddles, guitars, mandolins, and banjos and sang Jingle Bells, Silent Night, The First Noel, I Saw the Light, and You Are My Sunshine. Outside, it was 40 below and the moon shone on the snow-covered ground.

Elders Gideon James, the Rev. Trimble Gilbert plus Wilbert Kendi helped my son Mike and I teach music all week. They are from the Athabaskan Indian fiddling tradition of rhythmic foot stomping and dancing. The kids loved it and many stayed after school to play just one more tune!

Arctic Village is the fourth stop in our Christmas tour that began Dec. 1 in Beaver and then continued on to Stevens Village and Tanana—little places along the Yukon River. We flew by small plane—all bundled up just in case we had to make an emergency landing. We usually camped out in schools—that sometimes had the only running water in the village.

The kids were so excited to see us come! It was so great to see their smiles as they picked up guitars or a banjo… I loved what one little 7 year-old girl in Beaver told me as I played the fiddle for her. “It talks,” she said, “it talks!” And the kids in Stevens giggled and laughed so much as they tried square dancing by themselves. In Tanana, Pete Peters traveled with us and brought Native drumming and language for a couple songs.

I’m still amazed at how fast all the kids learn. We use color-coding and simple notation. It was our third week-long visit to Arctic Village this year—and junior high and high school fiddle students can easily play over twenty songs including Amazing Grace, I’ll Fly Away, Liza Jane, Will the Circle be Unbroken, and The best part is the joy they feel—and the sense of accomplishment. On the guitar, it only takes a few days to learn the chords and start flatpicking. The mandolin is great for little fingers because there are two finger chords. We don’t have a lot of banjos and acoustic basses—but hopefully that will happen soon!

This trip is funded by school districts and Dancing with the Spirit—a new bluegrass music program for kids in Native villages in Alaska and Canada. Thru camps and school programs, young people take classes in fiddle, guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass—plus sing, dance, and form bands. Music can bring success and hope to villages struggling with alcoholism, drugs, and suicide.

The Rev. Trimble Gilbert from Arctic Village says, “In the old days we fought tribal wars with arrowheads. It’s a different type of war now—against drugs and alcohol. I believe we can win with music.” (more…)

The Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America (SPBGMA) has announced the nominees for their 2008 Bluegrass Music Awards.

Unlike the awards handed out by the International Bluegrass Music Association - which are awarded based on several rounds of ballots by peers and industry pros - the SPBGMA Awards are determined by fan voting, with ballots printed in major bluegrass music magazines.

Many of the names are the same on both lists each year, but as the name suggests, the SPBGMA Awards tend to favor more traditional bluegrass music - though the award categories are often broken into Traditional and Contemporary subdivisions.

The awards will be announced and distributed on February 3, 2008 at the conclusion of the 25th annual SPBGMA National Convention, held at the Sheraton Music City Hotel in Nashville, TN.

You can see the complete list of nominees on the SPBGMA site.

November 3 will see four new exhibits unveiled at the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, KY.

Three will focus on the pioneering work of members of the IBMA’s Hall of Honor:

• Pete Kuykendall - founder of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine
• Lance Leroy - booking agent for Lester Flatt, Jimmy Martin and The Bluegrass Cardinals
• Bill Vernon - radio host, writer and archivist whose 7,000 bluegrass LPs have been donated to the IBMM.

The fourth exhibit celebrates The McCormick Brothers (Lloyd, Kelly and Haskel), who performed in the 1950s and 60s and recorded for Hickory Records. Red Hen Boogie, released in 1954, became a signature song for the band and was a radio hit for them as well.

The IBMM says that…

The historic exhibits contain photos, record contracts, instruments, radio equipment and clothing that document these forerunner’s contributions to bluegrass music.

Find out more bout the IBMM and their important work on their official web site.

This Saturday (9/15), Radio Bluegrass International (RBI), an online radio service of the International Bluegrass Music Museum, will feature portions of their interviews with Jake Quesenberry, an important figure in west coast bluegrass, and a co-founder of the California Bluegrass Association.

Jake passed away on July 3 of this year, but his reminiscences had been recorded by the IBMM as a part of their Video Oral History project. This is the museum’s crucially important mission to capture audio interviews with the early generation of bluegrass pioneers before their first hand reportage is lost to us.

Jake’s contributions to bluegrass music are fondly remembered on the Pleasant Valley Music blog site.

You can catch the RBI program on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. eastern time on the IBMM site. For now, there is no charge to access the online audio feed at RBI, but a $4/month subscription will be required starting on October 1.

Our industrious British correspondent, Richard F. Thompson, is back with an expanded overview of a story Brance posted last month.

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs will be among this year’s five new inductees into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Foundation, Inc. announced on Monday. Flatt and Scruggs first met as part of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945. During his time with Monroe, Lester Flatt assisted with the growth of his leader’s song writing and is credited as co-writing Will You Be Loving Another Man and When You Are Lonely. Flatt sang lead on and thus helped to popularize many of the songs that they did. Of course, Scruggs’s banjo playing at this time was wholly ear-catching and new to the vast majority of those who saw and heard the innovative Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.

In 1948 they left Monroe and started their own act, forming the Foggy Mountain Boys and the duo, recognizing that original material would help to create an individual identity and repertoire, began to write their own songs. Their catalogue is vast and a partial list alone features many songs readily recognizable as ’standards’ ….. God Loves His Children, I’m Going To Make Heaven My Home, We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart, My Cabin In Caroline, Down The Road, So Happy I’ll Be, Don’t Get Above Your Raising, Your Life Is Like A Flower [with assistance from Bea Lilly] and Blue Ridge Cabin Home, [credited to Louise Certain (Scruggs) and Gladys Stacey (Flatt)].

Additionally, Lester Flatt penned many that are credited in his name - or his wife’s name, Gladys Stacey (Flatt) - alone. These include Why Don’t You Tell Me So, I’ll Never Shed Another Tear, Is It Too Late Now?, My Little Girl In Tennessee, I’ll Never Love Another, I’m Head Over Heals In Love, The Old Home Town, I’ll Stay Around, Get In Line Brothers, Brother, I’m Getting Ready To Go, Be Ready For Tomorrow May Never Come and You Can Feel It In Your Soul.

Earl Scruggs wrote and arranged a considerable number of instrumental pieces, including Foggy Mountain Breakdown, Earl’s Breakdown, Flint Hill Special, Dear Old Dixie, Foggy Mountain Chimes and Randy Lynn Rag, along with Shucking The Corn and all the traditional tunes that are featured on one of the band’s most successful albums, the all-instrumental Foggy Mountain Banjo. (more…)

Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby will be performing on stage together during the 6th Annual Americana Honors & Awards show at the Ryman Auditorium on November 1. The event is part of the Americana Music Association’s annual conference, which runs from October 31 - November 3 this year.

Several artists who we cover on The Bluegrass Blog are up for awards from AMA this year. Sam Bush is nominated as Instrumentalists of the Year, and Uncle Earl for New and Emerging Artist. Both The Duhks and Old Crow Medicine Show are nominated as Duo/Group of the Year.

Find out more about the Americana Music Association on their official web site.

The International Bluegrass Music Assocaiation has announced the nominees for the 18th Annual International Bluegrass Music Awards. [press conference photos here]

Rhonda Vincent & The Rage lead the pack with 11 total nominations, split between the boss and her band members. Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver have 9 amongst them, and Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, The Del McCoury Band and Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder each received 7 nominations.

The awards will be presented on Thursday October 4 at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, TN, in an awards show and gala hosted by Sam Bush.

The Bluegrass Blog is providing expanded coverage of the nominations for these awards, with posts that include the names of each nominee, along with links to their web sites, bios and audio, in each of the award categories. We hope that this coverage will aid members of the press who will be reporting on the awards, as well as IBMA members who want to do some research before casting their votes.

To view the nominees, click on the (more…) link at the end of this sentence, or click on the title of the post. (more…)

The Southeastern Bluegrass Association (SEBA) has just announced the formation of a new chapter. The TAG Chapter has been formed to serve the Greater Chattanooga Area, including East Tennessee, Northeast Alabama, and Northwest Georgia.

The TAG Chapter has scheduled it’s first monthly meeting and jam session for the afternoon of August 19th (3rd Sunday), from 2 PM to 5 PM. The meeting will be held at Lyndon Avenue Baptist Church.

For more information call Tom Layton at 423-308-0858 or Steve Daugherty at 423-875-5250. To be placed on the chapter’s email list please send an email to egrassblast@yahoo.com with “SEBA” as the subject line.

SEBA is a non-profit organization consisting of fans, musicians, promoters and friends of bluegrass music, which works to preserve, promote and publicize bluegrass music.

Brance posted a few weeks ago about The Cool Mandolin Company, founded to promote our favorite eight-stringed instrument - particularly to young people - and the CD they produced to raise money for their work.

They have now announced a new program, the Cool Mandolins for Kids Program, which they jokingly describe as “The new cure for Mandolin Acquisition Syndrome.” The idea is to seek unused mandolins that are gathering dust, and get them into the hands of eager young pickers.

Do you have a gently-used mandolin at home that would make a child really happy? If so, we’d love for you to send it to us. We’ll find a young picker that’s in need of one and send it directly to them. It won’t cost anyone a cent. We won’t take any fees and we’ll pay the shipping fee to the recipient.

We LOVE the mandolin and we want to help promote it to the next generation of “mandolin legends.” Won’t you help us?

If you have a mandolin to donate, or would like more information about the Cool Mandolins for Kids Program, you can contact Laura Leder by email, or by phone at 215-630-8047.

Regular readers of The Bluegrass Blog know that we always like to highlight the efforts of young bluegrass musicians - and the people who assist them in learning to play. We have a number of stories we would like to share along those lines.

Last year around this time, we ran a piece about Scott Gates and Pacific Ocean Bluegrass, a group of California teens who donated a portion of their CD sales to help fund scholarships for young pickers to attend the California Bluegrass Association’s annual Music Camp.

The camp is held in conjunction with CBA’s Father’s Day Festival each June, where they also host a Kids On Bluegrass event. Players age 3 to 18 are allowed to audition to be part of a group performance at the festival, with coaching and rehearsals held during the year before each show.

Several videos from this year’s Kids On Bluegrass show have been posted on YouTube where you can see a gaggle of eager young pickers joining Rhonda Vincent on stage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBASL-hcBWg

On a related Youth Bluegrass Movement note… ukbluegrass.com has a story up about Miles Apart, a group of five teen aged British bluegrass musicians. They discuss how they all came to discover and learn to play bluegrass music, and what they hope to accomplish in the future.

Our own local paper, The Roanoke Times, has a piece this week about another young bluegrass band, The Cana Ramblers. They are a family band featuring three winners of the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention youth competition.

Read the article by Ralph Berrier on the paper’s web site, and check out some photos and audio of the Ramblers at Galax in a multimedia slide show.

The International Bluegrass Music Association has recently created a page on MySpace to help spread the word about the organization and its mission.

At this time of year, that mission is largely centered on the 2007 World of Bluegrass convention and Fan Fest, occurring October 1-7 in Nashville. You can find details about this year’s events on their MySpace page, with links to get further details.

You also find audio podcasts with Doyle Lawson, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas.

Their MySpace URL is www.myspace.com/internationalbluegrassmusicassociation.

NBC News4 in the District of Columbia recently ran a story online about the DC Bluegrass Union. The story is text only and featured online in the DC Scene section of the station’s website.

The story takes on the tone of a concert review while the writer recounts the experience of attending a house concert promoted by the DC Bluegrass Union. The concert is that of our friend Frank Solivan II, which the writer seemed to enjoy. The story is supposed to be about the efforts of the DCBU to promote bluegrass music in that area, and the writer does sing some praise for those efforts.

The somewhat hidden, but resourceful, DC Bluegrass Union has been promoting and supporting Bluegrass music in the D.C. area since 2001 and connects shows akin to the Lake Barcroft series and genre specific musicians in the area.

You can read the story here.

The Americana Music Association has announced the nominees for their 2007 Honors and Awards, with the winners to be announced on November 1 during their 6th Annual Americana Music Association’s Honors and Awards Show in Nashville.

Several of the nominees will be familiar to readers of The Bluegrass Blog, including Sam Bush for Instrumentalist, Uncle Earl for New and Emerging Artist, and both The Duhks and Old Crow Medicine Show for Group/Duo.

You can see the complete list of 2007 AMA nominees on their official web site, where you can also find details about the Americana Music Conference, October 31 through November 3, 2007.

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Bill Monroe is still four years away, but long term strategic planning is already underway to commemorate the occasion. This morning’s (6/25) edition of the Owensboro, KY Messenger-Inquirer has a story about this effort, and the collaboration among a number of entities to bring it all together.

The article notes that the centennial efforts hope to tie together the Birthplace of Bill Monroe in Rosine, KY (and the nearby site of the Jerusalem Ridge festival), The International Bluegras Music Museum (IBMM) in Owensboro and the Bean Blossom festival which Monroe started more than 40 years ago in Indianna. The International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) is also expected to be involved.

From the article by Keith Lawrence:

“We need a commission to work on this,” said Gabrielle Gray, executive director of the bluegrass museum. “This has enormous potential for Kentucky - if we’re unified in our approach. In one short weekend, you could walk the paths Bill Monroe walked as a boy, visit his boyhood home and grave and explore the whole history of bluegrass music at the museum.”

“I strongly suspect it will be big,” said Dan Hays, executive director of the Nashville-based International Bluegrass Music Association. “Some folks are already talking about what needs to be done. It is, and rightly should be, a big deal. We’ve got it on our long-range planning agenda.”

The article doesn’t seem to be available online from The Messenger-Inquirer without a paid subscription, but it is posted at PopMatters.com.

The European Bluegrass Music Association has released some numbers on their recent European World Of Bluegrass events, which took place May 17-19 in Voorthuizen, the Netherlands. In this, their tenth annual festival, ticket sales were up by 20% over 2006, with similar impressive gate increases at other European bluegrass festivals during the month of May.

The official post-event press release from EBMA lists several otehr newsworthy items about EWOB ‘07, many of which have already been reported here on The Bluegrass Blog.

They also show the dates for the 2008 festival as being May 1-3, again in Voorthuizen.

You can access the rest of the details on the EBMA site.

Award-winning bluegrass photographer and author Stephanie Ledgin will see images from her most recent book, From Every Stage: Images of America’s Roots Music, highlighted in a new exhibit which opens on June 21 at the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, KY.

The IBMM exhibit will open during the museum’s annual music festival, The River of Music Party (ROMP), and will remain on display through June 2008. It contains 40 of the 200 original photos, along with text panels from the previously unpublished interviews, contained in the book.

Find out more about Ledgin’s books and photography on her official web site.

ukbluegrass.com has first hand reports on the recently-concluded European World Of Bluegrass in The Netherlands. Two British bands traveled to Voorthuizen to participate in the EWOB, and each wrote of their time at the convention.

Both EWOB veterans, The New Essex Bluegrass Band, and newcomers, The Carrivick Sisters have posted their reports online.

Read their articles at ukbluegrass.com.

The International Bluegrass Music Association has announced the list of acts which have been invited to showcase at the 2007 World Of Bluegrass convention in Nashville (October 1-7).

• Circuit Riders
• Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper featuring Audie Blaylock
• Grass Cats
• Grasstowne
• The Faris Family
• Carrie Hassler & Hard Rain
• Sierra Hull & Highway 111
• Claire Lynch
• Meantime
• Monroe Crossing
• Dan Paisley & Southern Grass
• Don Rigsby & Midnight Call
• Three Ring Circle

Six more acts will be selected shortly for label-sponsored “Special Showcases” which will also occur during the World Of Bluegrass event. Interested labels should contact IBMA for more details.

The gist of the selection process and the goal of the showcases is described by IBMA thusly:

The purpose of each presentation is to introduce their talent and material to event producers, broadcasters, labels, media and other prominent industry professionals attending the events. Those invited include artists with significant new recordings, emerging talent or established bands introducing significant changes to their act.

Congratulations to the 2007 IBMA Showcase Artists.

The International Bluegrass Music Association’s marketing effort to bring new listeners into the fold, Discover Bluegrass, has a revamped web site, and encourages IBMA members to take advantage of some of the promotional opportunities offered via DiscoverBluegrass.com.

The site now will highlight a featured artist each month, bluegrass event listings, prize giveaways, and a new Bluegrass Artists page where any member bluegrass band or artist can have a photo and contact information (email, phone, web site) listed at no charge.

To be a considered for a FEATURED ARTIST feature, please send the following:

• A five-paragraph feature/bio that incorporates interesting facts about the artist.
• 3 hi resolution digital images including the latest album (images are 475 X 225 and 100 X 100).
• A link to the artists website
• OPTIONAL: A conversational podcast, no longer than 5 minutes, about some aspect of the artist’s bluegrass influences or career.

To be part of the ARTIST LISTING PAGE, please send the following:

• A three to five sentence description of the band/artist
• A 150 x 150 digital picture
• A link to the artists website
• Contact Information (email address and/or phone number)

To be part of the EVENT LISTINGS, please send the following:

• Event Name
• Event Logo
• Event Dates
• Event Location (please include physical address)
• Event Description (3-5 sentences)
• A web address or phone number for more information on your event

Listings on DiscoverBluegrass.com are only available to current IBMA member bands, events or individuals - another great reason to join if you are not yet a member. There have been some personnel changes in the IBMA staff, so information for or about these listings should be directed to Jill Crabtree, as Tina Potter (press relations) is no longer working at IBMA.