More detached notes (updated)

Dark Shadow Recording announce that Chicago's Henhouse Prowlers released on Friday last (18 Aug.) 'My last run', the fourth single from their new album Lead and iron, which is scheduled for release on 15 Sept. The song can now be heard on Bluegrass Today.

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New Zealand-born fiddle maestro George Jackson, now resident in Nashville, TN, has just released an album of orginal compositions for fiddle, George Jackson's Local Trio. In an article on No Depression he asks the question Why make a fiddle album? and gives his own reasons for doing so, concluding: 'at its core it’s art for the artist, music for the musician, deep cuts for the appreciator. And that’s music at its most thrilling and risky and rewarding.'

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Alan Munde, one of the finest performers and most prolific composers for banjo in the history of bluegrass music, has a new album out, Excelsior, on Tom Mindte's Patuxent Records label. The album is reviewed by Braeden Paul on Bluegrass Today, with a playlist sampling all the tracks.

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Recent Bluegrass Unlimited podcasts include interviews with past visitors such as Molly Tuttle, Raymond McLain, and Jeff White. The 144th Bluegrass Unlimited weekly newsletter also includes a Spotify playlist of the recordings of Lorraine Jordan & Carolina Road, and (from the BU archives) a July 2010 article by Nancy Cardwell on Jesse McReynolds at eighty years of age.

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On 4 August Steve Hochman published on the Bluegrass Situation (BGS) a history of the Kentucky Colonels, one of the most enduringly influential West Coast bands. The figures in the cartoon at the head of the article look nothing like any of the members of the band, but don't let that worry you. The article includes seven videos illustrating stages in the career of the Colonels and of Clarence White, their epoch-making lead guitar player.

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Pete 'Dr Banjo' Wernick, founder of the Wernick System and apostle of the art of jamming, has contributed to the Deering Banjo Company blog a valuable article on how to recognise chord changes, and why they matter. This article was originally published in the late lamented Banjo News Letter.

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Taylor Hagood, author of Stringbean: the life and murder of a country music legend (published earlier this year), will give a talk at the American Banjo Museum on 9 Sept. 2023. More details are in John Lawless's feature on Bluegrass Today.

© Richard Hawkins