On October 28, 2006 The Daughters Of Bluegrass took home the coveted Recorded Event of the Year award for their second CD release, Back To The Well. The evening before the awards were announced, they also performed at an official IBMA showcase, and video from that show is now posted on YouTube.

Songs available from that show include:

All seven of the videos can be found on the Hope River Entertainment YouTube page.

Each year during the annual IBMA World Of Bluegrass Business Conference, a variety of educational seminars are offered for the benefit of the professional membership. Topics are varied, and are geared towards the needs and interests of artists, event producers, bluegrass associations and songwriters.

Topics this year included getting radio airplay for your CD (led by several prominent bluegrass broadcasters), health insurance issues for performers, and a business mentoring session with Mac Wiseman.

The seminars are also recorded for wider distribution, and this year’s are available now through IBMA. They are available on either CD or cassette, and are offered for $15 each, with discounts in quantity.

Though attendance at the seminars was restricted to the IBMA membership, the audio recordings are available to members and non-members alike.

You can find the ordering details, and a list of the seminars which are available, on the IBMA web site.

We have made a few references here on The Bluegrass Blog to the various reactions that have been generated by the “patriotic theme” of last month’s International Bluegrass Music Awards in Nashville. The IBMA Executive Committe made some changes to the content of the show a few days prior to its staging to both alleviate the possibility of offending their non-US members, and to keep the show’s presentation within the guidelines that have existed in the past.

The Board’s requests were ultimately not honored, and then-President David Crow resigned to demonstrate his acceptance of responsibility.

You can find our earlier posts if you would to review what transpired, and what has been said about it.

The IBMA Board of Directors has just issued a statement to the membership which includes their assessment of what happened, and what they mean to do to ensure that the producers of the annual Awards Show have the sort of guidelines and oversight to avoid such occurences going forward.

Speaking just now with IBMA’s Executive Director Dan Hays, he nicely summed up the Board’s position as saying that it “was ‘what do we do about the future?’ and not ‘what do we do about the past?’ ”

As such, the Board statement focuses not on placing blame, but on conciliation and a focus on those things about which everyone in IBMA agrees is important – the continuing furtherance of the music, in the US and throughout the world.

IBMA members will each receive a copy of the statement from the Board by email, and it can also be viewed online.

That’s the question that’s answered in the final installment of Wichita Rutherford’s IBMA video clips. It’s one of Wichita’s great True or Rumor podcasts. If you just can’t stay out the personal life of a bluegrass celebrity and have to know what Alison called her grandmothers, then you’d better click over to Wichita’s Blog, watch the video, and find out the truth from Alison herself.

Sadly, Wichita is saying this is the last of the video clips in the series. That saddens me because I was cheering him on in his Ricky Skaggs impression and really wanted to see him nail it. I just know he can do it.

To watch him try, and fail, a couple times you might want to watch those clips as well while you’re on his blog.