Last week we lost Happy Traum, one of the shining lights of acoustic music for over half a century. It’s hard to fully grasp, in our online world where everything is right there whenever we need it, just what an enormous contribution Happy and the Homespun team made to helping people learn roots and acoustic…
Read MoreMy guest this week is Roger Siminoff. Not only is Roger an authority on instrument making, the physics of music and tap tuning, he's also an expert on the life and work of Lloyd Loar. Loar worked at Gibson in the early 1920s and oversaw the production of some truly remarkable, game changing instruments –…
Read MoreMy guest on the podcast this week is Chris Eldridge, guitarist with Punch Brothers and Mighty Poplar. Chris is not only one of my favourite guitarists, he's also one of my favourite people I've had on as a guest, so I'm delighted to welcome him back to Bluegrass Jam Along to celebrate the podcast's 400th…
Read MoreMy guest on the podcast this week is Brittany Haas, fiddle player with Hawktail and, now, Punch Brothers! I interviewed Gabe Witcher last June, a few days after he played his final shows with Punch Brothers at Telluride. Almost exactly a year later to the day I spoke with Brittany to chat about joining the…
Read MoreMy guests this week are Ruth Oxenberg and Rob Schumer. They join me to talk about a very special series of concerts they've curated called Bluegrass on Hudson, which are happening at The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, in New York's Hudson Valley. But we start by talking about a wonderful…
Read MoreMy guest this week is Tony Trischka, who returns to Bluegrass Jam Along to chat about his superb new record Earl Jam. We talk about Tony receiving a thumb drive containing 200 unheard recordings of Earl Scruggs jamming with John Hartford, and his amazement at not just how many tunes were on there that he'd…
Read MoreToday – June 8th – is Tony Rice's birthday. To celebrate, I'm reposting the chat I had with Alison Krauss as part of the 'Church Street Blues' 40th anniversary celebrations last year. The final episodes ended up being almost 5 hours long, so I thought it would be fun to re-post this as a standalone…
Read MoreMy guest this week is Jacob Jolliff, who joins me to talk about his wonderful new record Instrumentals 2: Mandolin Mysteries We talk about the process of writing the record and how many of the tunes began on piano rather than mandolin, plus the great band Jacob assembled to record and tour the album. We…
Read MoreMy guest this week is Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, who returns to chat about her great new record 'I Built a World', which comes out on Friday May 24th. This is Bronwyn's first record as a lead singer and we chat about her song choices, the musicians she chose for the record, the wonderful line up of…
Read MoreMy guest this week is Oliver Burkeman, best-selling author of the book 'Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals.' 'Four Thousand Weeks' isn't a book about bluegrass, or American acoustic music…or even about music. But, it addresses so many of the the things that can trip us up and stop us from making the…
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