A past visitor and a future visitor

Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (right), who has toured Ireland several times (thanks to John Nyhan) as a member of Boston's Mile Twelve, is now a sought-after session musician and a member of Molly Tuttle's band Golden Highway, and won the IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year award in 2021 and 2022. A major interview with her by author Mike Fiorito appeared last week on Bluegrass Today: 'The Bell Bottom bluegrass of Bronwyn Keith-Hynes'. In it, she reveals:

I grew up in an Irish American family. My dad’s parents immigrated from Ireland during World War II. And so, much of my dad’s family are still over there, and we would go to Ireland a lot when I was a kid. That experience exposed me to Irish traditional music. It was one of the first fiddle styles I got into, and I was passionate about that as a kid and a teenager.

Later, when asked whether she would ever record Celtic music:

I think I identify too much as a bluegrass fiddler. I mean, maybe, you never know. Life is long, and I love that music [Celtic] so much, but I don’t feel like I identify with it anymore. I have a deep love for Celtic music, but that’s not me anymore.

Along with a great amount of information, the interview is accompanied by three videos.

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Billy Strings will be playing in Dublin early next month. Whether or not you were lucky enough to get a ticket for the show, the Bluegrass Situation (BGS) offers an opportunity to hear him playing and singing with Dierks Bentley on a video released today, and also on YouTube, of the song 'High note'. The video sets the world-famous Station Inn in Nashville, TN, in a nuclear-apocalyptic background, in which Bentley and Strings declare their intention of going down (or out) on a high note, 'like a tenor in an old hillbilly band'. The song will also be on Bentley's forthcoming album, with artists including Jerry Douglas (dobro), Sam Bush (mandolin), and Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton (guitar).

© Richard Hawkins