Gospel singer and songwriter Joyce “Dottie” Rambo was killed early Sunday morning while traveling from Illinois to Texas, when her tour bus encountered severe weather on Interstate 44 in southwest Missouri. The bus ran off the road near the town of Mount Vernon and struck an embankment. Rambo was pronounced dead at the scene. Seven passengers on the bus were injured, several seriously.

Nashville, Tennessee, resident Rambo was on her way to a Mother’s Day concert at a church in North Richland Hills, Texas, following a Saturday night performance in Granite City, Illinois, just outside of St. Louis. She was 74.

Dottie Rambo is perhaps best known as a songwriter. Among her more than 2,500 published songs were gospel classics such as He Looked Beyond My Fault and Saw My Need, Sheltered in the Arms of God, Behold the Lamb, Holy Spirit, Thou Art Welcome, and We Shall Behold Him, the gospel music Song of the Year in 1982.

Her songs have been recorded by artists as varied as Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston to Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent.

She was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007.

Alison Krauss and Robert Plant were featured on the BBC One TV programme Later …. With Jools Holland on Tuesday night, May 6.

The duo, currently on tour in Europe performed two songs, Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On) and One Woman Man.

Holland conducted a brief interview with the couple also during the half hour show. Also on Tuesday’s programme was Emmylou Harris, accompanied by Buddy Miller, singing Gold.

Krauss and Plant, who were supported by the likes of T Bone Burnett, Dennis Crouch, Stuart Duncan, Jay Bellerose and Buddy Miller, will be guests of Jools Holland again on BBC Two Friday, May 9, 11.35 p.m. (GMT), during which they will sing Killing The Blues.

The Later show posted a preview clip on their web site from tomorrow night’s show.

Alison Krauss & Robert Plant will be performing a concert in Chattanooga, TN on Wednesday of this week, and our good friend Wichita Rutherford is giving away four tickets to the show. He’s giving them away in pairs so there will be two winners who receive two tickets each.

You’ll have to hurry to win though, entry in the contest ends at 4PM CST today. He’s made the entry interesting, it’s not as simple as just filling out a zip code and email address. You’ll have to work for it bit.

Visit Wichita’s Blog for more details.

Yeah, yeah…  I know - it’s not bluegrass. But a lot of readers here on The Bluegrass Blog follow Alison Krauss’ music wherever it may take her.

Sales of her new CD with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, have made it plain that the pairing is on to something, being recently certified as platinum (1,000,000 copies sold) by the RIAA.

The second music video from the album has been released, and can be viewed on the Rounder Records web site. It’s for the song, Please Read The Letter, written by Plant and former Led Zeppelin band made Jimmy Page. The video was shot in LA by director Rocky Schenck.

The rock music blogosphere is buzzing with the news that Robert Plant has reportedly turned down the notion of a Led Zeppelin reunion tour, preferring to focus his attention on his newfound musical partnership with Alison Krauss. Their duet CD, Raising Sand, was released on Rounder in October of 2007.

A story published over the weekend in England’s Sunday Mirror claims in an exclusive that…

Robert Plant has turned down an extra £100million fortune to take Led Zeppelin on a world tour.

The rock legend wants to concentrate on his new partnership with US country singer Alison Krauss… spelling the likely end of the famous band.

Zeppelin fans are not pleased.

Read the brief Mirror piece online.

The Dan Tyminski Band performed in Roanoke this past Friday night, and we had a chance to sit down with Dan before the show to talk a bit about this latest chapter in his storied musical career. We also talked about Dan’s early days in bluegrass, and how it first caught his attention.

Before we could get to any of that, Dan held forth as a proud papa, sharing stories about his three children and their exploits in the realm of sports. After a bit of discussion about the looming baseball season and a bit of golf, he was ready to talk music.

Dan recalled that the Roanoke area was where he first starting playing bluegrass professionally when he joined The Lonesome River Band in the late 1980s.

“Tim Austin [Lonesome River Band founder and current Tyminski Band road manager/audio engineer] told me that I couldn’t live in Vermont and play with the band, and that I would have to get another job in order to pull it off. I really wanted to play with a southern bluegrass band, and moved to Virginia from Vermont with only 4 gigs and no solid prospects of more than $1800/year.”

He joined LRB as a banjo player, but Austin brought him on primarily for his strong tenor voice. When their then current mandolinist Adam Steffey left the group, Tim prevailed upon Dan to switch to mandolin. His first recording with the band was their 1989 release, Looking For Yourself.

“Mandolin was my first instrument, but I fell in love with banjo when my older brother came back home one day with a JD Crowe album. Once I heard Crowe, I had to learn banjo.

Singing was something I had done since I was a boy. I still remember my first stage performance. It was at the You & I festival in Granville, NY. I pulled on Smokey Greene’s pants leg and asked if I could sing a song. That was as scared as I had ever been in my young life, but I sang John Denver’s Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas. Of course, any kid that sings on stage gets a big response, but I loved getting that reaction from the crowd.”

A few years after Dan’s first LRB release, the band went through some major personnel changes, bringing banjo picker Sammy Shelor and vocalist/guitarist/bass player Ronnie Bowman into the group. Their 1991 CD, Carrying The Tradition, brought Lonesome River Band to a much wider audience, and elevated Ronnie and Dan as prominent voices in bluegrass. (more…)

Tonight (2/11) is the first airing of the episode of CMT Crossroads featuring Robert Plant and Alison Krauss performing the music from their duo release, Raising Sand.

Crossroads has long had as its theme combining artists from different backgrounds to perform each other’s material live on stage, and the Plant/Krauss collaboration will be no exception. In addition to several songs from Raising Sand, the show will feature revised arrangements of Led Zeppelin classics and popular songs from recent AKUS projects.

Tonight’s broadcast is scheduled for both 1:00 and 8:00 p.m., with encore presentations on 2/15 at 3:00 p.m., 2/17 at 10:00 a.m. and 2/19 at 1:00 p.m. All times ET/PT.

CMT has a video preview available on their site, featuring the pair on the Everly Brothers’ Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On), the first single from the new CD, which was awarded the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals trophy at last night’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Old Crow Medicine Show is nominated for two CMT Music Awards, both for their I Hear Them All music video from their 2006 CD, Big Iron World.

They are nominated in the Group Video and Wide Open Country Video of the Year categories.

The complete list of CMT Award nominees can be found at CMT.com, along with links to all the videos.

Our UK correspondent, Richard F. Thompson, put together this report on an important event we missed last fall.

In November the legendary folk/bluegrass singer, songwriter and activist Hazel Dickens was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame at a ceremony at The Cultural Center in Charleston, West Virginia.

Belatedly, I submit this tribute and report of the evening’s activities ……….

Considered one of the most influential and powerful artists, male or female, in the world of Americana music, Ms. Dickens was presented with her award by her longtime admirer, Alison Krauss.

Born in the coal-mining region of West Virginia (Mercer County), Ms. Dickens moved to the Baltimore area while in her late teens. There she found friendship and musical compatibility with local area musicians like Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard. Dickens, Gerrard and Seeger along with Tracy Schwarz and Lamar Grier recorded an album released an LP under the name of the Strange Creek Singers. Later, Hazel and Alice worked together as a duo. They recorded four ground-breaking albums before they went their separate ways in 1976.

Subsequently, Ms. Dickens has released several solo albums that have presented what has been described as “her uniquely personal amalgam of old-time string band sounds, bluegrass, protest songs, and classic country.”

Her music is renowned for the way in which she has spoken up for the impoverished, like the coalminers of her own and nearby states. Songs such as Working Girl Blues, Black Lung, and Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There speak typically of her feelings for the cause of those who have suffered or are suffering hardship in their lives, like many of the Dickens’ family members themselves.

Her music was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., which depicted the tensions surrounding a coal miners’ strike in rural Kentucky. Her poignant songs, such as Mama’s Hand, Few Old Memories, West Virginia, My Home and You’ll Get No More Of Me, have been widely recorded by other artists.

In 1993 Ms. Dickens was presented with the International Bluegrass Music Association [IBMA] Award of Merit. Three years later she won the IBMA Song Of The Year award after Lynn Morris recorded a superb version of Mama’s Hand.

In 2001 Hazel Dickens was awarded a Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest official honor bestowed on traditional musicians by the U.S. Government. (more…)

Tickets for the two week Robert Plant and Alison Krauss European tour go on sale today (12/14).

There are currently 12 dates booked in May of 2008, with four shows in England amidst stops in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Norway.

The touring band has not been announced, but we hope to get those details soon.

The first single from the new Robert Plant and Alison Krauss CD, Raising Sand, is for the song, Gone, Gone, Gone. The world premier of the music video for the single will be on November 29 on CMT’s Top 20 Countdown.

The show’s format is the familiar countdown to number one, with choices for favorite videos each week being partly determined by online voting. The Gone, Gone, Gone video is set to enter CMT in a medium-heavy rotation, with better than 20 airings weekly.

We have received a number of press releases suggesting that the video will air at 4:00 p.m. on 12/29, but the CMT site indicates that Top 20 Countdown is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. that day.

The video should be available for online viewing after the TV debut.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will be among the guests on The Charlie Rose Show aired today (11/13) on most PBS television stations. They will be on to discuss their new CD, Raising Sand, along with producer T. Bone Burnett.

Times vary in different markets, so be sure to check the TV schedule for your area if you would like to catch the show.

Online video of recent shows is available on the show’s web site, so the Krauss/Plant/Burnett may appear there in a few days should you miss the discussion when it airs on PBS.

CMT.com is reporting that Jerry Douglas told reporters at the CMA Awards in Nashville that he will start work on a new recording with Alison Krauss & Union Station by the middle of next year.

Rounder Records doesn’t have any information yet about when they might complete this next project, or when it may be released.

Jerry will also have a new solo project of his own in April on Koch Records, and plans to tour in support with his band in the Spring.

Alison Krauss & Union Station will perform on tonight’s (11/7) Country Music Association Awards show, televised in the US on ABC at 8:00 p.m. (EST).

For AKUS fans, this may be the last chance you’ll have to see them for some time, as they are on hiatus for 2008, and possibly beyond. Alison will be touring with Robert Plant in support of their new CD, Raising Sand, and Dan Tyminski has launched his own band which will debut early next year.

The band will perform the song, Simple Love, from Alison’s recent compilation plus project, A Hundred Miles Or More.

Of this fall’s new releases, few have received as much attention in the music business press as Raising Sand from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, just out on Rounder Records. The notion of the sweet-voiced bluegrass balladeer teamed with the former Led Zeppelin vocalist, and super-hot producer T-Bone Burnett was too tempting to resist, and speculation about the album’s likely success has been a hot topic since its release was announced by Rounder back in August.

It seems that the media interest has been reflected among music consumers, and after one week in release, Raising Sand has made an impressive debut on the Billboard charts. The CD shows up as the #1 Rock Album for the past week, and #2 in the Top 200 Albums, Country Albums, Internet Sales and Digital Sales.

This isn’t a recording that grabs you by the shoulders and hits you over the head from the first track - nor is it a bluegrass project by any stretch (obligatory disclaimer). The music is subtle - and genre-bending - with producer Burnett using an interesting layered approach to the use of the primarily acoustic instruments in the mix.

Percussion is generally muted and understated, and the quirky rhythms typical of Led Zeppelin can be found. But so can Krauss’ trademark soft-sung sound, an approach that commands your attention as surely as Plant’s early wails with Led Zep ever did.

Find more details on the CD on the duo’s new web site, where you can also hear the entire CD online, and see for yourself whether the music calls to you.

The pair have been making media appearances in London this week, after doing the same in the US last week. They have taped an episode for The Charlie Rose Show, and a performance for CMT Crossroads, both due to air in the near future. Their recent interview with NPR’s Studio 360, where they discuss how the pairing came to be and how the recording progressed, can be accessed online.

This Saturday (11/3), Sirius Satellite Radio subscribers can hear an hour-long interview with Plant and Krauss on Sirius Disorder (channel 70) at 4:00 p.m., with rebroadcasts on Sunday (11/4) at 6:00 p.m. and Monday (11/5) at 2:00 p.m. All times eastern.

I don’t know how many of our readers still watch Sesame Street, but maybe you’ve got some kids, or grandkids, who do. I just discovered that the Sesame Street label released a DVD earlier this summer featuring several bluegrass and country artists.

The DVD is entitled Kids’ Favorite Country Songs, and contains all the makings of a musically good time. Sesame Street perennial favorites, Elmo and Elmer, lead the way to a country jamboree featuring both Alison Krauss and John McEuen, along with a number of country music stars.

While John plays his banjo and sings Oh Susannah, he’s accompanied by an assortment of barnyard animals. He commented that he enjoyed the filming of the DVD and had a great time,

playing the banjo with about 50 goats, a cow and about 15 kids running around.

He went on to say that as a musician you are always wondering when you’ve reached the pinnacle of your career. Now he knows.

When Elmo introduces you, you know you’ve arrived.

In addition to McEuen and Krauss’ contributions, country stars, Johnny Cash, the Dixie Chicks, Lee Ann Womack, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and super star Garth Brooks, all take part in the festivities.

Great American Country (GAC) will be rebroadcasting their special Alison Krauss program tonight (10/8) and tomorrow on their cable TV network. The show, Alison Krauss: A Hundred Miles Or More, finds Ms. Krauss in the studio, recreating many of the memorable performances from her recent CD of the same name.

She sings duets with James Taylor, Brad Paisley and John Waite, and her impeccable band, Union Station, is also featured.

The show airs this evening at 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. (10/9), and again on Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. All times are US Eastern time.

Another piece of news we picked up here at IBMA is the imminent launch of Dan Tyminski’s band.

All of the Union Station guys have been looking at a blank schedule for 2008, with Alison Krauss planning to take the year off from band work, and it seems to have been the opportune moment for Dan to move forward with his own band. They played a showcase here earlier in the week and created quite a stir.

The band will be Ron Stewart on banjo, Justin Moses on fiddle, Barry Bales on bass, Adam Steffey on mandolin and Dan on guitar. They are headed into the studio almost immediately after IBMA, with a release on Rounder Records expected very early in 2008.

Adam will continue doing shows with Mountain Heart at least through the end of this year.

UPDATE 10:15 a.m.: Thanks to Barry Bales for catching my earlier error - Ron Stewart is on banjo and Justin Moses on fiddle. That’s my lesson not to post anything after 1:00 a.m. at IBMA with precious little sleep!

We’ve got a stack of new recordings to check out during the drive to Nashville, and we’ll pass along some comments during the week.

In the stack are Raising Sand from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Bill Emerson & The Sweet Dixie Band, and John Sebastian & David Grisman along with several others.

We also just received the next two DVDs in the Flatt & Scruggs TV Show series - but we’ll have to get to the hotel to give those a look.

Look for Alison Krauss as a guest on the Friday, August 31 edition of Nightline, the long-running ABC nightly news program. She’ll be on for a regular Nightline feature called Playlist, where prominent pop artists discuss their favorite songs - what’s on their playlist.

She taped this segment when the band was in New York recently for an AKUS tour stop.

Nightline typically airs following the late local news on ABC affiliate stations, but you might want to double check for air time in your market.

Video from the Playlist segments also appear on the ABC News web site after they have aired, so check that video archive if you miss Friday’s broadcast.