Here we are one month after the 2007 IBMA World of Bluegrass. If you followed along here on the blog you saw a lot of the photos and video we posted, but content is starting to find its way to the web in other places.

Our good friend Dave Roye has started posting galleries of his photos from the event. Dave tells me he took over 2,000 photos this year and it’s taken him a while to go through them all. But he’s made it part way and he’s edited a bunch of them and resized them for viewing online.

He currently has photo galleries up from the Business Conference that took place Monday - Wednesday. He’s also got galleries from some of the artist showcases that occurred during the early part of the week. He promises more galleries soon from the Awards Show and Friday and Saturday at Fan Fest.

If you missed the event this year, this is a great way to check out what happened. And if you were there, you might relive a little of the fun and excitement while going through Dave’s photo galleries.

Two weeks ago at IBMA John and I, along with Brandi Hart of The Dixie Bee Liners, conducted a seminar, the official title being Establishing & Maintaining an Effective Web Presence. I thought I’d do a recap here of some of the topics we discussed during the seminar, as well as some we didn’t get to but had intended to cover.

The main point we focused on was the difference between merely having a web presence, and having an effective web presence. Now, effective means that it successfully produces the desired results. That means you must have some desired goals in mind to begin with.

As an artist or event producer or DJ or whatever, we all have the same basic goal for our web presence. We want to make a living at bluegrass music and we intend for our web presence to assist us in doing so. From that point on though, the specific goals will differ considerably. That’s your first task, decide what your goals are. Here are a few suggestions.

• networking
• gathering contact info
• maintaining communication with fans
• finding new fans
• selling merchandise or tickets

You get the idea. Depending on your goals, you go about developing your web presence differently, but some constants remain.

One of the main topics of discussion was MySpace. A point we kept trying to make was that MySpace is not YourSpace, it’s TheirSpace. (more…)

GAC-TV was a primary sponsor of the IBMA Awards Show last week, and this week they are beginning a run of four episodes of their show Edge of Country, featuring a large number of bluegrass artists.

GAC describes Edge of Country as:

a great mix of bluegrass, Americana, country rock and traditional styles.

The footage was captured by GAC during the IBMA World of Bluegrass week in Nashville. From what I understand, it consists mainly of interviews conducted backstage during Fan Fest.

Some of the time slots are’t all that fantastic, but at this point it’s just nice to see some coverage of the event making to air.

According to the GAC website, the first segment runs tonight at 11 PM EST and then again at 3 AM EST.

The second segment will air only once at 1 PM EST tomorrow.

Similar times are given for the third and fourth episodes, set to air on October 19-20, 2007.

Here’s a list of the performer to be included in the series.

• Doyle Lawson
• Sam Bush
• Ronnie Bowman
• Jim and Adam of Mountain Heart
• Grascals
• Larry Cordle
• Chris Jones & John Pennell
• Rob Ickes
• Williams and Clark
• Newfound Road
• Cadillac Sky
• Donna Hughes
• Red Stick Ramblers
• Bradley Walker
• Mark Newton & Carl Jackson
• Alecia Nugent
• Cherryholmes
• The Greencards
• Marty Raybon
• J.D. Crowe

UPDATE 9:45 a.m.: GAC will also air the new Randy Kohrs music video, Who’s Goin’ With Me, along with an interview with Randy following the Mountain Heart piece. The new video will then go into regular rotation on Edge Of Country.

OK… here is our final photo gallery from the 2007 IBMA Awards show on October 4 in Nashville. Special thanks to Tami Roth for getting us such superb photos.

If you would like to see all of our coverage of the 2007 IBMA World of Bluegrass and Awards Show, just click the IBMA 2007 tag just under the post title.

        

        

        

As promised, we’ll have a couple more photo galleries from last week’s IBMA festivities in Nashville. Here is a batch of photos from the party held backstage at The Grand Ole Opry house just prior to Thursday’s International Bluegrass Music Awards.

           

           

           

           

During an IBMA week conversation with John Eberle of Americana Mastering, an excellent suggestion for a new IBMA Award category came up.

John remarked that, given the degree to which bluegrass artists and fans appreciate the subtleties of acoustic instrument tonality, it might be appropriate to consider an award for the best audio recording of the year.

It struck me as a marvelous idea as well, though I suspect that the IBMA Awards Committee may not immediately warm to the notion of new awards.

We’ve heard from a number of readers who were unable to view the photo galleries we had posted from IBMA last week. It seems to have been restricted to users of Internet Explorer 7, though not all IE 7 users were affected.

In any event, we have modified the code to remove the tag that caused this problem, so anyone who had trouble seeing the IBMA images should be able to do so now.

• IBMA: Tony Trischka Keynote
• In the Exhibit Hall
• Tuesday Evening Showcases
• IBMA: Wednesday Night Photos
• IBMA Awards Show Photos
• More Awards Show Photos

We actually have some additional photos which we will post later today or tomorrow, as soon as we recover from last week.

If you would like to follow our live blog coverage of the Awards Show, you can find it arranged in chronological order here.

It’s time now for our annual recap of the IBMA Awards and a comparison to our unofficial poll.

Here are the results.

Last year we only got 7 out of 17 correct in our poll. This year we got 7 out of 17 right again. It seems we’re establishing a track record.

It’s interesting to see how our readership compares to the voting membership of IBMA. Visit the IBMA website to find out more about IBMA membership.

More updates from IBMA and the World of Bluegrass coming soon.

Missy Raines wrote in this morning to offer some additional thanks she was unable to give during the award show last night due to time constraints. I’ve copied her comments below.

Dear folks,

I am so honored to have received the 2007 Bass Player of the Year award last night. I just wanted to say thank you! I am overwhelmed.

I wanted very much to take the opportunity to say something that I didn’t get to say last night, and that is, I want to thank Claire Lynch and the Claire Lynch Band for letting me play with them. I want to thank Claire for hiring me almost 10 years ago and giving me the fertile ground and nurturing support to grow as a musician. Claire Lynch, Jim Hurst and Jason Thomas, are 3 of the best musicians in this business, and playing with them is a dream come true. Being on the road with them is so great, we have a lot of fun and they are the consummate professionals. I cherish them and I’ve learned so much from them.

I’ve been on stage a zillion times through the years, and I always get a little nervous, but being on stage for just those few sweet seconds these (unbelieveable) 7 times to accept this great honor have given new meaning to an “out of body” experience. Or should I say, “out of shoes” experience…

Thank You very much.

Sincerely,
Missy Raines

Yesterday John and I had the chance to sit down with the guys from Steep Canyon Rangers and conduct a short interview. We video taped it and I’ve uploaded here.

The guys spend some time discussing this past year and how it went for them after winning Emerging Artist in 2006. They also discuss, songwriting, the new CD, the next CD, and more.

The video is approximately 5 minutes in length and should load fairly quickly for most users. Enjoy!

Here is another batch of Tami Roth’s excellent photos from last night’s IBMA Awards show, and the after party hosted by Del McCoury at The Gibson Showcase.

             

         

      

         

Here is a set of photos taken at the IBMA Awards Show on October 4. They were taken by Tami Roth.

   

We’ll post some more photos in the morning.   Zzzzzz….

The awards show is over, but IBMA continues. In an effort to contain the awards show live blog, so that it doesn’t overwhelm the main page, I’ve moved all those posts to their own special page.

You can now read the posts in chronological order starting at the top of the page and following along going down, as if you were at the show. This is reverse the normal blog posting order which places the newest post at the top of the page, but it seemed more logical to order things in this way for the live blog posts. At least after the fact.

Please visit this page, to experience our live blog of the 2007 IBMA Awards Show.

Well folks, that’s it for the night. Sam just closed the event out with some closing comments. The winners are back stage grinning, shaking, and hugging. The celebration will continue into the night I’m sure. As for us, we’re heading to the after party for some congratulations and photos, then the hotel room to sort through a bunch of photos of this evening and post them up for you to take a look at.

See ya later!

The Chief, Sonny Osborne, is presenting the 2007 Entertainer of the Year award, which goes to The Grascals. Two in a row for the boys.

Sam Bush, our host for the evening has now been joined on stage by his band, consisting of Byron House, Scott Vestal, Stephen Mougin, and Chris Brown.

They are throwning down on a lively version of Bringing in the Georgia Mail.

Nobody has a chop like Sam, though his band certainly has some chops of their own!

Chris Jones and Jim VanCleve are presenting the Album of the Year. Who writes this stuff?

Oh my… it’s a tie! The award goes to J.D. Crowe & The New South for Lefty’s Old Guitar, and Fork In The Road from The Infamous Stringdusters.

J.D. Crowe & The New South are on stage at this moment performing a good bluegrass number for the folks.

Dwight McCall is singing lead on Just Loving You with Ron Stewart and Ricky Wasson completing the trio.

Eddie Stubbs - “the lovely and talented” according to Sam Bush - is inducting legendary bass player Howard Watts into the Bluegrass Hall Of Fame.

Kathy Mattea is presenting the 2007 Male Vocalist of the Year award, which goes to Bradley Walker.