onlinecountryuk

Thanks to Roger Ryan of the Country Music Association of Ireland (and graduate of the IBMA's Leadership Bluegrass programme) for news of another extremely useful source of information - the onlinecountryuk e-newsletter. It's edited by Jim Marshall, who describes it as

an irregular, irreverent, sometimes irresponsible, even irritating, collection of country music news views and reviews, a sort of internet version of the old BCMA Bulletin, the magazine, published by the now-disbanded British Country Music Association, which I edited for the best part of 40 years, but still concentrating on 'real' country music.

The UK news which it contains overlaps a good deal with the scene in Ireland, and there's a very noticeable percentage of bluegrass news - to name a few instances in the latest issue, there are items on David Grisman's new Acoustic Oasis website, Dierks Bentley's new bluegrass album, the September tour by Phil Rosenthal, and a reissue of Benny Martin's Big Tiger album by the British Archive of Country Music, together with a lot of useful links and tour dates.

You can subscribe to onlinecountryuk by sending Jim Marshall an e-mail. A link to the British Archive of Country Music has been added to the right-hand column of the BIB.