Online viewers are invited to pick their favorite videos from a much longer list, and the top 12 are announced as the CMT Pure 12 Pack each week.

Bluegrass fans who would like to see Dale Ann hang in there at the top of the charts for another week can cast their vote at CMT.com. And since you are allowed to select up to 12 videos with your vote, be on the lookout for a number of other bluegrass or bluegrassy videos worthy of your attention in the poll:

• The Abrams Brothers – Viva la Vida
• Melonie Cannon – Back To Earth
• The Duhks – Fast Paced World
• Old Crowe Medicine Show – Caroline
• Dan Tyminski – Wheels
• Bradley Walker – A Little Change

How cool would it be to see all those videos in the top 12!

Voting each week ends on Friday, so head over to CMT.com if you want to make your opinion known.

This Canadian teen bluegrass trio has hooked up with a New York management company, Invasion Group, and the guys have a new look and sound that is more polished and progressive than what people may have seen from them on the festival circuit in recent years. They are keeping the basic bluegrass approach, and including drums for their live shows.

The new CD on the United For Opportunity label is expected in the latter part of 2009, titled Viva La Vida for their grassy remake of the Coldplay hit from last year which anchors the project. In addition to Abrams Brothers John on guitar and James on fiddle, cousin Eli Abrams is on bass, Nick Piccinini is on banjo, Chris Brown on keyboards, and Anton Fier on drums. All three Abramses share vocal duties.

They have released a single and music video for Viva La Vida in advance of the CD. The video, directed by Derek Horn, debuted this past weekend on CMT and is getting some attention from the folks at the network. The single is available now in iTunes.

Here’s a look at the video…

If they can get a fraction of the attention going to another group of handsome young brothers in the pop music world, 2009 could be a very good year for The Abrams Brothers.

Give it a look and a listen below, courtesy of CMT.com, where several other OCMS videos can be found.

Tonight (1/9), they will appear on the Friday Grand Ole Opry during the 10:00-10:30 p.m. segment.

The Friday Opry show is available over the air on WSM AM 650, on XM channel 11 (XM Nashville), and simulcast worldwide via online streaming at wsmonline.com.

On Saturday (1/10), look for them again on CMT. They will be featured on the CMT Insider show at 1:30 p.m. to talk about their recording session with Hank Williams Jr.

CMT sent their cameras into the studio and caught interviews with Hank Jr. and the Grascals. From what we have learned, those sessions went quite well and there is some talk about future collaboration between the two.

This edition of Insider will also air on Sunday (1/11) at 11:00 a.m. (EST).

The format follows very closely to the “bracketology” of the NCAA basketball tournament. 64 contenders will compete for viewer votes in subsequent rounds of online balloting until just four finalists remain, from which one will chosen.

The winner will be flown to Music City (Nashville, TN) to tape a segment of Unplugged at Studio 330 for CMT.com and a showcase with Warner Brothers A&R execs. A mentor session with country star Randy Travis is also included.

Bluegrass acts are specifically invited to enter, and have done quite well in the competition in the past, though not yet reaching the finals.

To submit a video online, or by mail, you need to submit your information online. Live local auditions will be held on August 23 in Pittsburgh and Atlanta, and in Nashville on August 27. At least one act will be chosen at each live audition site.

Full rules and competition details can be found at CMT.com.

Case sees the situation from the perspective of a booking agent trying to book, schedule, and route shows for bluegrass artists. He talked about the increased price of fuel for tour busses, the increased cost of airfare and the decreased availability of flights, and the increased cost of rental vehicles.

Case relates the story of a recent short, three show tour, for Ralph Stanley.

He went from home [in southwest Virginia], played three dates that were all closely routed in Texas. He came back and his [roundtrip] fuel bill was almost $2,000.

Since these dates were all booked a year or more ago, the artists are really feeling the financial crunch from these fuel costs. My own conversations with artists indicate that many acts are unable to increase their asking price for a festival date because the promoters are simply unwilling to invest more in artist fees for next year while uncertain what attendance will look like a year from now.

Case ties a decline in CD sales to the increase fuel costs as well. Indicating that it not only costs the band more to get to the show, it also costs the fans more. Having spent much of their available cash on gas, the fans are buying less once they reach the festival.

…people are spending so much to go to festivals, as far as fuel costs go, that they are not spending as much at the festivals.

Interestingly, the author of the article then converses with a tour buss rental company manager concerning attendance at a couple of country music festivals. He then returns to bluegrass with Skaggs and Sharon McGraw.

Sharon shared that her research indicates no noticeable decline in bluegrass festival attendance, this year.

I think people have been a little more selective in how far they’ve gone [to attend festivals]. But attendance-wise, from what I’ve seen, it seems to be steady.

I think next year is when it’s all going to trickle down, when artists will say, ‘Well, we were just going to bite the bullet. Now we’ve bitten it, and it’s biting us.’ That may be where some of it comes apart.

We’ve run two polls this year, one at the beginning of the festival season, and one just recently, asking our readers if increased fuel costs would have an affect on their festival attendance this year. The results show 60% of readers indicating they are/have attending fewer festivals this year as a result of the increase in fuel costs.

If Ralph Stanley and Ricky Skaggs are feeling a financial crunch, it must be even more difficult for bands with lower booking fees, as fuel costs eat a larger percentage of their revenue. What all this means for he future of bluegrass is yet to be seen. Perhaps more bands and fans will take some advice from the title of the new Grascals CD!

The songs and interview clips from the show can be viewed now online. Dan and his crack band play four songs from his upcoming Rounder release, Wheels (Heads You Win, Tails I Lose, Wheels, How Many Times and Knock, Knock), and he spends several minutes discussing the project and his move from side man to solo artist on camera.

The Tyminski broadcast on CMT Pure will debut on Saturday, May 31, at 10:00 a.m. (EDT), with encore presentations over the course of the following week (all times eastern US).

• Saturday, 5/31 – 10:00 a.m.
• Sunday, 6/1 – 12:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.
• Monday, 6/2 – 7:30 p.m.
• Tuesday, 6/3 – 11:00 a.m.
• Wednesday, 6/4 – 3:30 p.m.
• Thursday, 6/5 – 11:30 p.m.
• Friday, 6/6 – 1:00 p.m.

CMT Pure is a sister digital television network to CMT’s primary feed, which offers all-day music videos, as opposed to the broader lifestyle programming on CMT. It is available on most digital packages from cable and satellite providers.

The video, filmed in Bryson City, NC in the heart of the Smokey Mountains with Los Angeles director Dallas Henry, features Vincent trying to get over a broken relationship by retreating to the mountains. The piece is Vincent’s first Hi-Def video. The Hi-Def format brings into sharp relief the beauty of early spring in the Smoky Mountains as well as the beauty of the seven time IBMA female vocalist of year.

The video can be viewed here at CMT.com.

Released in January, Good Thing Going has topped Billboard’s Top Bluegrass Albums Chart (currently #8), Bluegrass Unlimited’s Top 15 Bluegrass Albums Chart (currently #2), and Bluegrass Music Profile’s Top 10 Bluegrass CDs Chart (currently #1).

The Dallas Morning News says this of Rhonda …..

“She has everything it takes to appeal to the masses: the pedigree, the pipes, the chops and the looks.”

Dan and the boys will be performing material from his new CD, Wheels, due from Rounder on June 17.

There is a sneak peek video up now at CMT.com.

From 6:00-8:00 and 9:00-11:00 a.m. (ET/PT) CMT will feature blocks of all bluegrass videos on their popular cable TV network. The music videos will be mixed with live clips from the various bluegrass performances recorded for their Unplugged At Studio 330 series.

If CMT is offered in your cable or satellite package, you can get ready for work with bluegrass videos on Tuesday morning. They will also be launching bluegrass editions this week for their online video series Wide Open Country and Stacked on CMT.com.

This special programming is also being offered to help promote their new bluegrass section at the CMT.com Country Music Blog.

Hey… wait a minute! They’re moving in on our turf!

Just be sure to stop here and read The Bluegrass Blog each day before heading over there to see what they are up to at CMT.com.

Watch the full video on CMT’s Country Music Blog.

You can also see some behind-the-scenes photos from the video shoot in our earlier posts here and here.

Sierra had an especially poignant memory to cherish from Merlefest ‘08.

“One thing that was particularly exciting about this year’s Merlefest is that it was the first in which I’ve had my new album, Secrets (out May 6 on Rounder) for sale. Upon arriving to the festival Friday morning, I had not even seen a final packaged copy of the record yet. They were shipped directly there, hot off the printer! It was quite funny then having someone in the crowd bring me a copy to sign — that was my first time seeing it!”

Read all of these posts at CMT.com.

He will post as time and Internet connection allows, hopefully with photos as well. The band will be doing a number of European bluegrass festivals, but most of the shows seem to be theater and club dates.

Travis’ first post was published yesterday (4/28) as a warm up of sorts, and covers the band’s weekend at Merlefest plus performing Saturday on the Grand Ole Opry.

Keep an eye on the County Music Blog in May for updates from the weary travelers.

That means that the video will be shown tonight (4/25) on television on CMTP, CMT’s new digital channel. The show airs tonight at 9:00 p.m. (EDT) with rebroadcasts on Saturday (4/26) at 2:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., and on Sunday (4/27) at 10:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Additional show times later in the week can be found on CMT.com.

Congratulations, guys!

Visitors to Pure 12-Pack at CMT.com vote Fridays-Wednesdays and the top 12 are posted each Friday. Bluegrass videos have done well in this poll in the past, with Randy Kohrs sitting at #1 for several weeks earlier this year.

To vote for Sadie, just visit CMT.com and put your check next to his photo. You can watch all the videos – including Cadillac Sky’s Born Lonesome – online at the voting site. Multiple votes are allowed, and you can select up to 12 videos with each vote.

In another Doyle Lawson note… His brand new Gospel CD, Help Is On The Way, is available for immediate delivery on orders from Doyle’s web site.

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.

Morris pointed out what was surely a most frustrating reality for SPBGMA…

“In spite of the competing Super Bowl broadcast, the show drew a crowd of several hundred. But it was not an especially demonstrative group. None of the acts really ignited the audience, even though all of them performed some amazing music.”

Read the full article at CMT.com.

The tongue-in-cheek article is titled Deep In The Bosom Of Bluegrass, and discusses the writer’s favorable impression of Ms. Vincent’s choice in clothing – and the reaction that the cover of her 2003 CD, One Step Ahead, generated within the bluegrass community.

As one who is pure of heart, I barely took notice of Vincent’s stylistic swashbuckling until it came up at the 2003 International Country Music Conference. There, on a panel called "Country Music and Gender," banjo player and magazine columnist Murphy Henry grouched about Vincent’s recent epidermal revelations and then flatly declared, "You don’t show cleavage in bluegrass!"

Read the full piece at CMT.com.

We spoke with C-Sky’s Bryan Simpson about getting to record this show…

“The two things I remember about shooting under the ever-attentive eye of the CMT cameras was the never-ceasing war the touch up gal waged with the sweat on our brows and the struggle we fought within ourselves to not say something stupid during the interview.

We did five songs for the show: Born Lonesome, You Again, Homesick Angel (Sonya Isaacs came in to help us on that one-awesome) Basket Case (A Green Day cover that we did once for fun and haven’t been able to stop doing for a year and a half now) and an instrumental, Neighborhood Bully’s Long Look in the Mirror (which landed on the cutting room floor I’m told- only 4 songs were needed).

In the interview we discussed ourselves a lot, and then we spent a little more time on ourselves.”

Watch all the songs and the interview at CMT.com.

The C-Sky boys are using some down time early this year to prepare for their second Skaggs Family CD. They’ll be working with Mike Marshall producing, and are scheduled to start recording in March.

“We’ve basically assembled all the material in our grimy little hands for the new project and we’re thrilled with that part of it, but it will be hard to bid farewell to Blind Man Walking. He’s been a good compadre to us, and it’s gonna be weird giving all our attention to someone new… but time does march on Blind Man Walking, and we both knew it would come to this at some point……?!”

We did a show with Mike in Florida about a year and a half ago. He was down there playing with his first group (The Sunshine Boys, I do believe that was it – sort of a reunion thing) and he happened to hear our set and dug it. He came up on the side of the stage and professed that he wanted to produce us. We were like ‘yeah… but our first project hasn’t come out yet’ …well, when it came time to start the process of the new record, his name came bursting forth from our mouths. We’re all big fans of Mike – the person, and the projects he’s been involved in – and the fact that he’s a little crazy, made it an easy decision.

We have spent time discussing the project with Mike on a untraceable phone line to some extent and will be doing a little boot camp action at an undisclosed location very soon (doesn’t that make it more exciting?).

So everybody start marking your calenders. We are gonna tackle that 500 pound gorilla they call ‘the sophomore slump.”

Watch the full length video at CMT.com.

The band has been hard at work this fall on their next CD, an all Gospel project titled Help Is On The Way. It is set for a March release on Horizon, and Doyle feels like it may be his best recorded effort to date.

We’ll keep you posted as more details about the new CD emerge.