by Christine | Dec 21, 2010 | Welcome Column
As the festival season winds down, new bands are formed, band members play musical hop-scotch, and fans mostly watch from the sidelines, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good festival good. During the past several months a number of people have posted or...
by Christine | Jul 20, 2016 | Welcome Column
I have written columns previously about all the things that go wrong at a gig. It was fun and cathartic to recall all the weird things that have happened in decades of playing live gigs in a bewildering variety of venues. Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong,...
by Christine | Jul 11, 2010 | Welcome Column
Had a big shindig yesterday at our house. Fed about seventy people. Exhausted today so I’ll run a story I posted here six years ago about how I like to cook a lot. I Like to cook a lot a lot. January, 2004 I enjoy cooking a lot a lot. Which is to say I enjoy cooking...
by Christine | Feb 22, 2011 | Welcome Column
Well, it’s not really from me, it’s from our friend Henry Zuniga. Let me explain. The past several days I’ve been working in my shop building ridiculously huge numbers of picture frames. Many are for my wife’s watercolors, (portraits of the likes of Dale Ann Bradley,...
by Christine | Oct 19, 2008 | Welcome Column
Big Sur is beautiful already as is, but with a bluegrass festival it is even more amazing than usual. This campground wasn’t that big but every part of the campground was stunning. But enough about the campground let’s talk about the music. This festival had...
by Christine | Apr 12, 2011 | Welcome Column
The discussion rages on. Should what we call “bluegrass” music fit into a small and narrowly restricted definition created in 1946 when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs stepped on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry as members of Bill Monroe’s band? Or should we...
by Christine | Dec 9, 2014 | Welcome Column
For about a dozen or so years my wife Irene and I have spent a goodly portion of our lives listening almost exclusively to bluegrass music, that grand amalgam of old English folk music, gospel, jazz, western swing, and, yes, pop that emerged from Bill Monroe’s...
by Christine | Jan 19, 2020 | Welcome Column
Act One Scene One Recap: enter stage right a confident, maybe arrogant individual, in business attire, wearing a Stetson, polished boots, gently strumming a mandolin. He looks out on the audience and says in a strident voice “fake instruments should be banned; dobros...
by Christine | Nov 17, 2019 | Welcome Column
Politics run amuck. The BTBP (Big Tent Bluegrass Party) whose national logo was a medley of guitars, fiddles, mandolins, accordions, beat boxes, and didgeridoos, was attempting to out-muck out the STP (Small Tenter Party) that proudly displays a golden banjo logo with...
by Christine | Feb 3, 2011 | Welcome Column
Walking through the Nevada County Fairgrounds during the Fathers Day bluegrass festival, one couldn’t help but spot that shiny silver Airstream trailer. More often than not, there was a circle of pickers gathered outside the Airstream, but the songs coming from the...
