Does RollingStone know its bluegrass? Take a few minutes to read this article, recently published on the magazine’s website, and then answer in our poll.

Here’s the introduction.

It’s been more than 60 years since Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, unleashed the genre on the world with his Kentucky band the Blue Grass Boys. But a new crop of acts are paying tribute to the style, updating the old-time-and-country-music hybrid with contemporary rock and pop styles. Below are five acts to watch with commentary from bluegrass legends Del McCoury and Sam Bush:

The article, titled The New Bluegrass: Five Acts to Watch, presents a short profile of five bands RollingStone thinks are the up and coming face of “new bluegrass,” whatever that means. The five bands are: O’Death, Avett Brothers, Uncle Earl, Those Darlins, and Old Crow Medicine Show.

I don’t think these are the bands I would have picked.

How about you? Do you think Rolling Stone knows what it’s talking about?

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About two weeks ago we ran a poll asking you to submit and vote for your favorite bluegrass recording of 2008. With nearly 900 votes and over 150 submissions, we’ve narrowed it down to the top ten and we’re letting you vote again, this time we’re voting to put them in order.

Some of the submissions were for the same recording. Some were for a band name and not a recording. We took the time to merge the applicaple submissions before taking the top ten. Punch and Punch Brothers got merged together and are represented on this poll as Punch Brothers – Punch. All options are that way, band name – recording name.

So here they are, let’s vote and see what the readers of The Bluegrass Blog liked in 2008.

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We did state that the poll would be limited to those recordings released in 2008.  Unfortunately we had to remove two names from the list because they were released prior to 2008. We also removed two other names for which we could find no information online. These four were all in the top 10 except for the technicalities which disqualified them. We give them honorable mention below (in descending order based on the number of votes they received in the original poll).

• Frank Solivan II – Selfish Tears (2006)
• Rain Check – Confluence (2007)
• Danny Clark & The Martha White Boys (no info)
• Type Your Choice Here (no info)

There are many things to be thankful for on this day of national celebration. Here at The Bluegrass Blog we’d like to express our thankfulness for a great year of bluegrass music. 2008 gave us some incredible music.

Below we’ve included a poll allowing you to contribute the bluegrass recording you’re most thankful for this year. Please limit your entries to recordings released during the 2008 calendar year.

We’ll let this run for a week or two then we’ll take the top 25 vote getters and present another poll where we can narrow it down the Bluegrass Blog Top Ten Bluegrass Recordings of 2008.

UPDATE: Please submit recordings, not just artist names. Dailey & Vincent is both the artist name and the recording name. Grascals is just the artist name, Keep on Walking is the recording, and should be the submission.

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Halloween seems an appropriate day to release out gallery of Fiddle Faces. Some of these were sent in from readers. A couple of them are my own entries from the original post.

Take a look at all the Fiddle Faces and then place your vote for the Fiddle Face you think best represents

The demanding art of disfiguring your face like a rock guitarist

Options in the poll are not necessarily presented in the order in which the thumbnails appear above. Please consult the image pop-up caption for the name if you aren’t sure.

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