Last week’s Just Plain Folks Awards in Nashville brought good news to a number of our favorite bluegrass gals.

Donna Hughes, Valerie Smith and Donna Ulisse each won in different categories. Hughes took Bluegrass Album for Gaining Wisdom, Ulisse, Bluegrass Song for I’m Calling Heaven Down, and Smith Gospel Album for Wash Away Your Troubles.

Congratulations, ladies!

Just Plain Folks is a web-based community of musicians, songwriters, artists, publishers, producers, labels and other music business folks. They bill their annual awards as the world’s largest independent awards, with over 560,000 songs and  42,000 albums considered for recognition in the 2009 cycle.

They describe their mission as follows:

1. To provide a networking environment of inclusion and cooperation between our members for the benefit of the group and individuals involved.
2. To share wisdom, ideas and experiences with others who have been there, and to help educate those who have yet to make the journey.
3. To form long term relationships with a myriad of other industry professionals whose talents and efforts need a venue to be enjoyed and benefited from.
4. To set the example for the world of the power of the Internet and total freedom of communication, when it is not restricted by the boundaries of the corporate world, or damaged by the adversarial nature of the music industry in general.
5. To show others that deep down, we are all much more alike than different. The thoughts and hopes and dreams we all share are much the same whether we are Grammy Winners, Hit Songwriters, Industry leading Superstars in our fields, or we are an 11 year old kid with a new dream, or a 78 year old who still dares to dream!
6. And the most important goal: To have a lot of fun doing it!

The Awards Show was held on Saturday (August 29) at The Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville. You can see the complete list of winners (including runner ups) at the JPF web site.

Donna Ulisse’s recent studio visit with Kyle Cantrell for the taping of his popular Bluegrass Junction show Track-By-Track will be broadcast for the first time on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:00am. EST.

Ulisse and Cantrell discussed and played all thirteen tracks off of her current release Walk This Mountain Down and also talked about Donna’s early career in country music while on Atlantic Records.

The show will be repeated on:

• Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 9:00 p.m. EDT
• Sunday, May 31, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. EDT

Track-By-Track is broadcast on Sirius-XM’s Bluegrass Junction which can be found on Channel 14 on XM and Channel 65 on Sirius. Dish Network customers can listen to Bluegrass Junction on channel 6065 and DirecTV subscribers can hear it on channel 812.

Singer songwriter Donna Ulisse will set out next week month to visit radio stations in the southeast for a series of in-studio performances to promote her current release, Walk This Mountain Down.

The tour will begin with a live performance on the world famous Blue Plate Special on WDVX in Knoxville, Tennessee on Monday, March 23.

The WDVX Blue Plate Special is a live performance featured most weekdays at noon, EDT, Monday through to Thursday, at the Knoxville Visitors Centre in downtown Knoxville. The show is broadcast at 102.9 FM in Knoxville and webcast around the world.

The radio tour will include visits to other stations in Tennessee, and in Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina.

For more information on Donna Ulisse visit her website or her Myspace page.

Hadley Music Group, who recently released Walk This Mountain Down, their second CD from Donna Ulisse, has also created a web video to showcase Donna and the new album.

It was produced by String Theory Media in Nashville, and includes interviews with Donna, CD producer Keith Sewell and Ed Morris of CMT. Ulisse talks about how she fell in love with bluegrass and mountain music as a child, and how she rediscovered it again years later.

The video runs six and a half minutes and includes several pieces of music from the new CD.