Lester Woodie, Coming Up The Hard Road

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

In the Summer of 1949 a shy boy of eighteen rode up to Bristol, Virginia for his first professional job as a fiddle player. Behind the steering wheel was a man in his early twenties who had encouraged the boy’s music from the start. The older man’s name was George Shuffler.

“This is a good break for you,” George said to the younger man riding beside him. “The Stanley’s are tough, and what with making a guaranteed $50 a week, why you could send some home to the folks and still have more money than you would have ever made

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Grandpa Jones

By Charles Wolf

It was a hot night at the Grand Ole Opry in the summer of 1995. Out frontthe crowd in the Opry house was stocking up on Cokes and trying to explain to northern visitors what Goo ­Goos were. Backstage the talk was about whether or not the Houston Oilers were serious about moving to Nashville. An­nouncer Kyle Cantrell was checking over his schedule and getting ready to intro­duce the host for the 8:30 P.M. segment of the world’s longest running radio show. He smiled when he saw who was up next.­

Bradley-Kincaid,-Joe-Troyan-and-Grandpa-JonesAccompanied by his back-up band of

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Bluegrass Music in Western North Carolina

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

Western North Carolina has long been fertile ground for the growth of bluegrass music. In fact, no other region or state has contributed so much to its development.

For many people, the appeal of bluegrass music is that it is a relatively new form of music that sounds old. Most scholars agree that bluegrass first gained national attention when Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in 1945. In addition to Bill Monroe himself, this legendary band consisted of Lester Flatt (guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle) and Cedric Rainwater (bass). The reason that

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Diamond Joe

Gene Autry with an acoustic guitar

By Wayne Erbsen

I’ve always been a sucker for a good ole cowboy song. This isn’t because I was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Texas; I’m actually a native of southern California. Growing up in the late ’40s and early ’50s, I was raised on a diet of TV westerns like Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Maverick, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Bonanza, and Have Gun – Will Travel. Actually, I was listening to The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke on the radio before they became popular TV shows. My favorite movies were Shane

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A Word About the Free Bluegrass Guitar Tabs

Flatpicking Guitar for the Complete Ignoramus! instruction book by Wayne Erbsen

Howdy!

These free bluegrass guitar tabs are written out in my unique tab system that I invented after teaching guitar for fifty years. Instead using numbers on the strings to represent the fret that you play, I put the name of the note that you play on the string.

This method does require you to learn the names of the eight notes of the scale, and where to find them on your guitar. This may seem like a “royal pain,” but trust me, this will give your music a BIG BOOST.  You absolutely need to know the name of the

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The Dreaded Count-In

By Wayne Erbsen

Perhaps you’re a lurker at the bluegrass jam or pickin’ session. Sometimes you’ve heard the musicians count at the beginning of the songs with “one, two, three” or “one, two, three, four” and wondered how and why they’re doing that. You may have been in a position of having to start a song in a jam, and you’ve dreaded having to do the count-in. In either case, read on.

When it’s your turn to start a song in a jam, the surest way to get the other musicians to come in at the right place is to

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“Keep a-Goin’” Musician Everett Lilly of Clear Creek, West Virginia by John Lilly. Photograph by Michael Keller

everett_lilly_089pBorn in 1924, musician Everett Lilly has been going strong for nearly 85 years, living just a stone’s throw from the Clear Creek property where he was born. A casual observer might not realize that Everett, together with his late brother “B,” traveled the world over, performing and promoting the music of his Raleigh County home.

The Lilly Brothers, playing with neighbor Don Stover, introduced countless new fans to the down-home music of southern West Virginia at the peak of their popularity during the mid- to late 1960’s. Singing tight, “brother” harmonies and playing at a breakneck tempo on guitar,

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Doc Watson’s ‘Your Lone Journey’ + tab for fiddle, mandolin & banjo

Doc Watson c 1969Whenever two old-time musicians get together to sing, there is one special song that is always held in high esteem: “Your Lone Journey.” I’d always heard that Doc Watson’s wife, Rosa Lee, wrote it, but often wondered about how she came to write it.

Recently, I asked my friend, David Holt, what he knew about the song. Of course, David and Doc played together for years.  Here’s how David explained the origins of the song:

Rosa Lee told me she was sweeping the house one day and thinking about people in her family who had passed on. She

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Hank Williams’ Lost Charleston Show By John Lilly

When he left his Alabama home on December 30, 1952, Hank Williams had his sights set on West Virginia. He was billed as the headline act for a gala “Western Style Revue” at Charleston’s Municipal Auditorium and was scheduled to perform two shows here on New Year’s Eve night. Sadly, he never arrived.

Little has been written about this Charleston engagement. Most authors, researchers, and fans have shifted their attention instead to Canton, Ohio, where Hank was expected to perform the following day. On January 1, 1953, in Canton, the first public announcement was made about the passing of this

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Is It Hard to Play the Mandolin?

By Wayne Erbsen

Heck no! It’s easy as eating pie if you approach learning the mandolin in the right way. Of course, there is no shortage of free information, tab, and musical notation of mandolin music on the web. The challenge is finding information that’s geared to your style of learning.

A lot of the music for mandolin is written out in a system called “tab.” Numbers on lines represent the fret that you play on a string. This might be OK at first, but it’s actually a ridiculous way to learn. Why? Because learning from tab will insure that

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