The road winds through the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia, and the Pisgah and Nantahal in North Carolina. Almost every mile avoids population centers of any kind, and with easy access off and on along the way, is a tourist favorite for its spectacular mountain vistas of the Blue Ridge region.

Of course this region has been home to a great deal of bluegrass and old time music, and the seminal artists who defined it. The National Parks Service and the National Council for the Traditional Arts jointly operate a venue near Galax, VA to acknowledge the musical history of the area, The Blue Ridge Music Center.

The Parkway is celebrating 2010 as their 75th Anniversary with a full year’s worth of special events along the way. Things kick off this Saturday with a benefit show near Asheville, NC featuring what will surely be a memorable musical aggregation.

Billed as The Blue Ridge All Stars, this one-time grouping of musicians born and bred in the VA/NC mountain region includes Doyle Lawson on mandolin, Sammy Shelor on banjo, Bryan Sutton on guitar, Jim Van Cleve on fiddle and Tim Surrett on bass.

Jim told us that Bryan Sutton put the group together.

“Bryan Sutton called me back in April or May about this show, and it’s something I’ve been looking forward to ever since then! It’s a big honor to be involved in a BIG SHOW of this nature, and the band Bryan has assembled will be a BLAST to play with!!!”

Singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith is also on the show, which will be held in the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium at the Asheville Civic Center. Proceeds from the show will go towards the funding for the 75th Anniversary events during 2010.

You can find full concert details on the BRP 75th site.

Doyle’s secular shows and bluegrass festival appearances will continue to be booked by The Paradigm Agency.

Lawson also reports that their brand new, official Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver bandanas are now available, and should be up on his web site later this week. No festival getup is complete without one!

Corey is a native West Virginian who has played and sung bluegrass and Gospel music since he was a young boy. He spent time on bass with Change Of Heart, a Southern Gospel group, and more recently with Jim & Valerie Gabeheart, a bluegrass Gospel band. Like so many talented bluegrass artists, Hensley is also proficient on banjo and guitar.

Doyle, however, brought him to the band for his clear, powerful voice. He debuted with Quicksilver this past weekend.

A family man at heart, Corey had previously resisted offers to perform full time, but I suppose that Doyle can be very persuasive.

Doyle’s set featured songs from his current Rounder CD, Lonely Street, plus a couple of their all-time favorites like Blue Train. The music is great as always, and the audio engineer actually discovered the banjo after a few songs.

The Lovells’ segment is also made up from material on their latest CD, Time To Grow, a self-produced effort that marked their shift from a teen act to a group of serious young musicians. Jessica Lovell spoke to us at length last year about the travails they experienced in getting it released, and what led them to reject a major label contract with a glidepath to mainstream pop success.

You can read that interview on The Bluegrass Blog.

The Sara Watkins set from Mountain Stage is also available online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve watched all 8 videos, you’ll know the correct responses. Winners will receive autographed copies of Lonely Street, other Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver merchandise, and one lucky winner will get a personal phone call from Doyle himself.

Doyle and his merry band offer up a number of songs from their latest CD, Lonely Street, and as is the custom on the show, chats with host Michael Jonathon about his early introduction to the mandolin through the music of Bill Monroe.

You can watch video of the hour long show online in the Windows Media format.

Samatha Crane and the Midnight Shivers also appear on the program.

This week he talks about The Bluegrass Album Band – how this star-studded group came to be and how they chose material for each of their six earthshaking albums.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman, an annual concert series in Nashville, begins June 25 with a show featuring Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, with Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper in support. The series at the historic Ryman Auditorium will also feature Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder (July 2), Rhonda Vincent & the Rage, Bobby Osborne & the Rocky Top X-Press and Next Best Thing (July 9), Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys and Jim Lauderdale (July 16), the Dan Tyminski Band and Steep Canyon Rangers (July 23) and Dailey & Vincent and the SteelDrivers (July 30).

Ticket information can be found at The Ryman web site.

You can submit your own question for future episodes by simply adding a comment to this post.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There will be a trivia contest at the end of this webisode series, with amazing prizes for the winners who have mastered all manner of Lawson lore from these videos.

The first episode is in the form of a “behind-the-scenes” peek at an interview Lawson did with Bill Cody at WSM in Nashville. Bill manages to stump Doyle with a couple of obscure trivia questions about his long career in bluegrass music, which led to this Ask Doyle promotion, and a special trivia contest for Doyle Lawson fans.

Each Friday, a new video will be posted on YouTube, MySpace and here on The Bluegrass Blog. To submit a question for Doyle to ask in a future webisode, just leave a comment where you watch the video.

Here’s the first installment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In keeping with his current practice of alternating themes every other CD, this project is a primarily secular recording. The material is drawn from some of today’s top songwriters, with a number of classics thrown into the mix. New songs included came from Carl Jackson, Buddy Cannon, Mark Simos and Chris Stuart. Lawson also covers songs from Marty Robbins and Porter Wagoner, in addition to the title song which was a hit in the late 1950s and the 1960s for Andy Williams and Patsy Cline, performed here as a vocal trio throughout.

This album was recorded in the Fall of 2008 with Doyle’s then current band: Darren Beachley (guitar/vocal), Carl White (bass/vocal), Joey Cox (banjo), Josh Swift (resophonic guitar) and Brandon Godman (fiddle), with Lawson on mandolin and vocals.

The CD starts with a tribute to the Father Of Bluegrass, Monroe’s Mandolin, which Doyle said was a special song for him.

“I’m hearing Bill Monroe’s name mentioned less and less these days, and I don’t want to see that happen. He’s the reason I play bluegrass and I wanted to do something to put Bill’s name back out front.

This song was cut by The Bressler Brothers and when I was putting songs together for this CD it seemed like a perfect fit.

Monroe’s Mandolin  -  Listen now:   

The track starts with a solo mandolin (Evening Shadows, a tune of mine) and we put some nature sounds in the background. Bill loved the outdoors – loved to watch his horses and chickens – and I could just envision someone sitting on their front porch playing the mandolin, like I did as a boy.

The track ends with the first part of Watermelon on The Vine, which was Mr. Monroe’s theme song when he hosted the Opry.”

Another song that Doyle said was special to him is Yesterday’s Songs, written by Lisa Shaffer, Mark Simos and Jon Weisberger.

Yesterday’s Songs  -  Listen now:   

“This one really hit home for me. I can so clearly recall the voices as I was walking by a church, and hearing them sing the old songs.

Jon Weisberger sent me this song while we were in the studio, and I liked it so well that we started working on it right away.”

Lonely Street is available now wherever bluegrass music is sold, from the Doyle Lawson web site and in iTunes.

That was the date in 1979 when he rehearsed his first band, Doyle Lawson & Foxfire, which soon was changed to Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. That seminal band featured Doyle on mandolin, Terry Baucom on banjo, Jimmy Haley on guitar and Lou Reid on bass.

Their first, self-titled record helped define modern bluegrass music as much as any other this past thirty years, and sounds as fresh today as when it was first recorded. Over this period some of today’s most critically acclaimed artists have passed through Doyle’s band, and left their mark on his more than 30 recordings of bluegrass and Gospel music.

In addition to the original members listed above, Doyle has hired, tutored and said goodbye to such noted players as banjo pickers Scott Vestal, Jim Mills and Dale Perry, lead vocalists/guitarists Russell Moore, Steve Gulley, and Jamie Dailey, fiddlers Shawn Lane and Mike Hartgrove, and bass players Ray Deaton and Barry Scott. He counts 39 musicians in total who have worked as a member of Quicksilver.

Doyle tells us that this past 30 years have also seen him go through six buses and a motor home, with 17 different bus drivers (including himself). He has released records with six labels, containing 494 songs.

Before launching his solo career, he had memorable stints with JD Crowe’s Kentucky Mountain Boys and The Country Gentlemen. That is a strong enough resume to retire on, but Doyle is showing no signs of slowing down with a busy 2009 schedule posted on line.

May 5 will see the release on Rounder of Lawson’s 34th album, Lonely Street, recorded with his current band: Joey Cox on banjo, Carl White on bass, Josh Swift on resonator guitar, Jason Barie on fiddle and Darren McGuire on guitar.

UPDATE 4/7:  As Jon Weisberger pointed out in his comment, Darren Beachley is on guitar on the new Doyle Lawson CD and Brandon Godman is on fiddle. We just got our copy today.

Doyle joins host Kyle Cantrell at 11:00 a.m. (EDT) to play each of the album’s 12 tracks and talk about the songs.

Lonely Street won’t be released until May 5 on Rounder, and this is likely to be the first broadcast of any music from the CD.

If you miss the show on Wednesday, it will run again on Sunday (4/5) at 11:00 a.m. and on Tuesday (4/7) at 9:00 p.m.

Bluegrass Junction can be found on Sirius track 14 and XM channel 65.

The album, recorded October and November 2008 at Crossroads Studios, Arden, North Carolina, and produced by Lawson, features 11 bluegrass tracks and a gospel song, Chris Stuart’s When the Last of Our Days Shall Come tagged on at the end. It will be available on the Rounder label (0635).

Monroe’s Mandolin, which was first recorded by The Bressler Brothers, and was previewed at the recent IBMA Award Show, opens the set and that is followed by several songs from the classic country era; Carl Belew’s title song, performed as a trio and given an up-tempo treatment; Porter Wagoner’s Big Wind; Marty Robbins’s Call Me Up and I’ll Come Callin’ On You; and the Buddy Cannon -Tommy Collins collaboration Ain’t A Woman Somebody When She’s Gone.

More recent compositions include Oh Heart, Look What You’ve Done from Carl Jackson and Russ Roberts; the topical The Human Race from Tim Mensy, Jimmy Phillips and Gene Dobbins; and Yesterday’s Songs from Lisa Shaffer, Mark Simos and Jon Weisberger. The instrumental Down Around Bear Cove, written by Josh Swift and Doyle Lawson, provides some more contrast.

The musicians featured are Doyle Lawson (mandolin, vocals), Darren Beachley (guitar, vocals), Carl White (bass, vocals), Joey Cox (banjo), Josh Swift (resophonic guitar, Weisenborn guitar and percussion), and Brandon Godman and David Johnson– fiddle.

Doyle Lawson has received numerous awards in his illustrious career ‚Äì he was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship, the Endowment’s highest honor granted to traditional and folk artists for career accomplishments. Lawson and his band Quicksilver have also picked up the IBMA award for Best Vocal Group an unprecedented seven years in a row.

His third album for Rounder, Lonely Street, proves beyond a doubt that Doyle’s artistry is top notch, his mastery of the genre is without question and his legacy as one of the genre’s most inspiring musicians and band leaders is assured.

Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver can be heard showcasing this material at their many personal appearances throughout the United States.

Bluegrass Recorded Song (song; album; artist; writer; label)

• Help Is On The Way; Help Is On The Way; Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver; Michael E. Reed; Horizon Records
• I See A Crimson Stream; Sounds Like Sunday; Janet Paschal; Garfield T. Haywood; Vine Records
• The Old White Flag; You Gotta Love It!; Triumphant Quartet; Dianne Wilkinson; Daywind Records
• They’re Holding Up The Ladder; We Are Family; Jeff & Sheri Easter, Lewis Family, Easter Brothers; Russell Easter, James Easter, Edd Easter; Daywind Records
• What Will I Wear?; I Just Wanted You To Know; Kim Hopper; Deborah Bailey; Canaan Records

Bluegrass Album (album; artist; producer; label)

• Bluegrass Worship; Various; Steve Ivey; Star Song Music
• Help Is On The Way; Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver; Doyle Lawson; Horizon Records
• Hymns From Chigger Hill; Chigger Hill Boys & Terri; Mike Richards, Terri Argot Gore, Ricky Gore, Mark Dunham, Bobby Strangenberg, Ethan Blair, Justin Kropf; Daywind Records
• I Don’t Regret A Mile; Larry Sparks; Larry Sparks; Sparks Music
• Pickin’, Praisin’, & Singin’: Hymns From The Mountain; Cody Shuler & Pine Mountain Railroad; Bill McBee, Dale Thomas, Jerry Cole, Cody Shuler, Matt Flake; Rural Rhythm
• We Are Family; Jeff & Sheri Easter, Lewis Family, Easter Brothers; Jeff Easter, Sheri Easter; Daywind Records
• What A Journey; Paul Williams & The Victory Trio; Paul Williams; Rebel Records

Bluegrass artists, musicians, producers and labels are also represented among the nominees in a variety of other categories, most notably in the following …..

Special Event Album (album; artist; producer; label)

• Billy: The Early Years Official Motion Picture Soundtrack; Brooks & Dunn, Mac Powell, Sara Evans, Alan Jackson, China Edelman, Patty Griffin, Brandon Heath, Gregory Page, Michael W. Smith, Melinda Doolittle, Roy Orbison, Brad Paisley, Josh Turner, Sierra Hull, John Cowan, Harry Stinson, Ronnie Bowman, Ronnie McCoury, John Wesley Ryles; Anastasia Brown; Arista Nashville, Essential Records
• Country Bluegrass Homecoming Volume One; Gaither Vocal Band, Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, The Grascals, Buddy Greene, The Isaacs, Gordon Mote, Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys, The Booth Brothers, George Jones, Wesley Pritchard, Reggie & Ladye Love Smith, Brittany Allen, Jeff & Sheri Easter, Charlotte Ritchie, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Jimmy Fortune, Dailey & Vincent, Jason Crabb, Rhonda Vincent & The Rage, Ernie Haase & Signature Sound, Cherryholmes, Lisa Daggs-Charette, Vince Gill, Sonya Isaacs, Becky Isaacs Bowman; Bill Gaither; Gaither Music Group
• How Great Thou Art: Gospel Favorites from the Grand Ole Opry; The Charlie Daniels Band, Mac Powell, Alan Jackson, Patty Loveless, Ronnie Milsap, Ricky Skaggs & The Whites, Sara Evans, Brad Paisley, Trace Adkins, Loretta Lynn, Vince Gill, Dierks Bentley, Carrie Underwood; Steve Gibson; Sony BMG Nashville

Long Form Music Video (title; artist; director; producer; production company; label)

• Country Bluegrass Homecoming Volume One; Bill & Gloria Gaither; Doug Stuckey; Bill Gaither; Gaither Television Productions; Gaither Music Group

The recipients will be announced at the televised show on April 23 in Nashville, Tennessee.

A complete list of nominees and more information about the GMA and the Dove Awards is available online.

In more than 30 years as a band leader, Lawson has seen more than a few musicians learn the ropes in his organization, and then move on to launch their own careers in bluegrass.

A look at the top drawing acts headlining the 2009 festivals bears this out. Singers Russell Moore, Steve Gulley and Jamie Dailey all came to prominence singing for Doyle. Jim Mills and Scott Vestal’s banjo picking likewise were first featured nationally touring with Lawson.

In fact, two existing bands, IIIrd Tyme Out and Mountain Heart, got their start when the founding members decamped en masse from Quicksilver.

But each time the band gets a new look, Doyle wishes them well, and finds strong new players and singers to keep moving forward.

“I learned a long time ago that changes would be a part of this business. When we first got together as Quicksilver, we knew that we wouldn’t always be together – somebody was always going to leave. And I don’t harbor any ill will. When they leave, I wish them the best.

Changes occur – nothing you can do about that, but with each change, I try to always have the best possible show I can for the people who follow my music.

It gives me a sense of pride when I see these guys go on to succeed on their own. I have freely shared my knowledge with the people who have worked for me. I know which ones really paid attention, and which ones didn’t. When I see somebody come through who did pay attention – like I did as a young man playing with Jimmy Martin, JD Crowe and The Country Gentlemen – I’m never surprised when they find success.”

Doyle says that rehearsals are going very well, and that he is very pleased with the sound of his latest group. Banjo player Joey Cox, resonator guitarist Josh Swift and bass man Carl White are still on board, with fiddler Jason Barie and guitarist Darren McGuire hopping on the bus for the first time this weekend for shows in Ashland and Prestonburg, KY.

Barie had been working with Larry Stephenson, and had toured prior to that with Carolina Road and Bobby Osborne. He had auditioned once before for Doyle, but that job didn’t come his way. Lawson keeps track of the people he might need some day, and reached out to Jason not long ago.

“I was at home with my kids the day that Doyle called. When I woke up that morning I couldn’t have guessed that Doyle would call me. In fact I didn’t even know that the fiddle job was available. I figured my day at home with the kids would just be a normal one. I was completely surprised by it all.

My first audition with Doyle was in 2001. I had just moved away from Florida to live in North Carolina. My biggest draw back in that audition was not knowing much of his material. The same was true in my second audition, but Doyle just had me play a few fiddle tunes and a few of his songs.

I was a nervous wreck. After all, second chances like this don’t come around too often, if they come around at all. I am thankful for this opportunity. It is huge for me and my family in more ways than one.

Taking this job is bittersweet for me, though. I left the Larry Stephenson Band to be in Doyle’s band. Working for Larry and traveling with the guys in his band was a lot of fun. It was a great experience, so I was sad to leave, but I am excited about getting to play in Doyle’s band. I sort of feel like I did when I was learning to play the fiddle, everything was exciting and new to me. I have that feeling once again. I am looking forward to playing Doyle’s music, expanding my horizons, and learning from one of the best teachers in the business.”

New Quicksilver guitarist and vocalist Darren McGuire had also tried out for the job once before in the mid-1990s, and like Jason’s prior audition, the time wasn’t right for him then either.

McGuire has been knocking around bluegrass for some time as a singer and songwriter, and was involved with side projects for Dwight McCall and a new Nashville-based band called Lonesome Heirs. The Heirs did occasional shows around da ‘Ville with Jeremy Garrett (Infamous Stringdusters) on fiddle, Jesse Brock (Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper) on mandolin, Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters) on guitar, Ned Luerecki (Sirius-XM) on banjo, Jon Weisberger (Lonesome Standard Time) on bass and McGuire on guitar/vocals.

Weisberger, a Nashville songwriter, session player and bluegrass journalist, has known Darren for some time, and featured McGuire on his If This Road Could Talk CD in 2008. Jon shared a few details about Darren, which show how perserverence pays off in the music world.

“Darren’s originally from southwest Ohio, and I first met him there in the early/mid 90s. He and banjo player Wes Pettenger put together a band called High Tymes, and they released one album, First Flight, on Mid-Knight Records back in 1997 that included the first recording of Darren’s Raining The Blues. I don’t think they got very far in the business, and the band folded up; I know he took a swing at putting at least one more band together after that, but again, nothing much came of it.

At the beginning of 2003, Dwight McCall put together a kind of side project band called Miami Road to play a weekly gig at a club in Middletown, OH, and that group included myself, Randy Pollard on fiddle, a good banjo picker named Ronnie Stewart (different one), and Darren.

I had to drop out after a few months, but I think that carried on for a while, and then Darren moved to western Kentucky, in maybe 2004 or 2005.  He called me not long after the move, and started coming down to picking parties here in Nashville every once in a while.  At SPBGMA in 2007, Jeremy Garrett and I spent some time jamming with Darren, and thought it would be cool to put something together that would showcase his singing a little bit, and that became the Lonesome Heirs; we played a couple of shows at the Station Inn that year, and then I used the group on my album in early 200

Pretty much everyone who’s heard him has been knocked out by his singing.”

You can check out a live recording of Darren singing Raining The Blues with The Lonesome Heirs on their MySpace page. If the song seems familiar, it was a radio hit for NewFound Road, who recorded it on their Somewhere Between CD.

You can also hear clips of McGuire from Weisberger’s CD on his MySpace page. Darren sings lead on Losing Again and At The Bottom Again, and tenor on When She’s By My Side.

Doyle said that the band is rehearsing some more this week, and will hit the stage this weekend with the new band for the first time. You can see their 2009 schedule online for a chance to catch them near you.

“I guess the music business is no different than any other occupation; change is part of everything you do. As far as me and my group, over 30 years, there have been quite a lot of changes. And after the years have past, here we are.

I just try to keep my foot in the past, my mind in the present, and my eye on the future.”

Here is his statement about the move…

"I will be leaving the group at the end of January. It was a life long dream to work here, but once you fulfill a dream, you have to move on to the next one. Now it’s time to put my stamp on the music with all the influences I have had in my career. I have had a good run here, and am proud of what was accomplished.

I feel I was a part of some ground breaking things. The first song I ever sang when I came here was He Lives In Me which became the second longest charting southern gospel song in history, along with winning IBMA’s gospel recorded performance of the year. I was very fortunate when I came here to be a part of a veteran band and be a part of IBMA vocal group of the year in 2006 and 2007.

The video for Sadie’s Got Her New Dress On was a number one video on CMT and was atop the bluegrass charts for six months. And there are many other things that I feel were really groundbreaking. The upcoming DL&Q recording that I am a part of will be out in the spring, and I feel it’s got some of the best material that I’ve heard in awhile.

I was also a mainstay through a lot of changes, that at times were very difficult. When you have seven new people go through a band in 3 years, it’s tough sometimes.

I will make a release in the upcoming weeks about my future plans.