Starting next week (2/14), the live bluegrass radio series Bluegrass Underground will move to a weekly, Saturday evening slot on WSM AM 650 from Nashville.

The new time is 6:00-7:00 p.m. (ET), just ahead of the Saturday Grand Ole Opry broadcast.

Live concerts are held monthly in The Volcano Room at Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, TN – in an underground cavern 300 feet below the surface.

Bluegrass Underground producer Todd Mayo explains how a monthly concert can turn into a weekly program.

“The show is still taped once per month but we have added a second act to each show, and will be able to produce enough content (with a few months having second shows added) to move the show to a one hour, once per week progam.”

You can find lots of photos, as well as video and audio clips from past concerts, on the Bluegrass Underground web site. Here’s one from an appearance by The Infamous Stringdusters late last year.

Later today (1/18) on KBCS, a special tribute to Butch Baldassari will air during Bluegrass Ramble.

The show airs from noon to 3:00 p.m. (PST), and has been a staple on KBCS for almost 25 years. They feature a format of bluegrass mixed with old-time and vintage country, co-hosted by Pete Goodall, Dave Long, Christine Linde and Tom Keeney.

This afternoon’s show finds Keeney joined by recently retired KBCS host Susan Madden for the Baldassari tribute from 1:30-3:00 p.m., west coast time.

KBCS broadcasts from Bellevue, WA at 91.3 FM, and via online streaming at www.kbcs.fm.

It’s not often that we see much in the way of televised bluegrass programming, much less broadcast in High Definition.

If you live in central Ohio, and don’t mind staying up late on Saturday evenings, you’ll be able to catch some High Definition Bluegrass for the next two weeks. WOSU TV is celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Bluegrass Ramble on WOSU AM, with two one-hour high definition bluegrass programs.

Each episode will hosted by Rich Baker, 20 year veteran of The Bluegrass Ramble. The two episodes will feature The Special Consensus and The Spinney Brothers.

WOSU has placed a 5 minute video from the program on the web page for The Bluegrass Ramble. The video features each band performing one song in full. It’s encoded for the web so the size is small, but the footage itself looks fantastic.

When WAMU’s Ray Davis notched his 60th year in radio broadcasting, Richard Thompson put together a nice career retrospective for us here on The Bluegrass Blog.

This past week, Ray was celebrated with a profile in Radio World, an influential trade journal for the broadcast radio industry. The article by Ken Deutsch follows Ray from the time he left his home in Maryland to take a radio job in Delaware, to his current position with WAMU’s Bluegrass Country doing five live bluegrass shows each week.

There is a classic photo of Ray from 1951, and some wonderful stories about his early days in radio.

“I sold every kind of product on the air,” said Davis. “You had to ad-lib copy back then and you could tell if you were doing OK by how many orders came in.

“They had a mailroom in Del Rio, Texas, where I lived. It was huge. I’d drive across the border every day to work at the station, which was in this compound with armed guards. One night when I was leaving, I found a scorpion in my car.”

Long before Ronco’s Vegamatic, Davis had his own unique items to peddle.

“The weirdest thing I ever pitched on the air was something called the ‘Walk-Away,’” he said. “That was a concoction that claimed to cure rheumatism or something. I said on the air that it was made from the sands of the testing grounds of the atomic bomb. That product was only on for a few days.”

Read the full article online at www.radioworld.com.