Upcoming Bluegrass Related Events

The program surveys bluegrass music from its roots in early country and fiddle/banjo music to more progressive acoustic music with the same instrumentation. The Splinters cover old time fiddle tunes and The Carter Family to Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers, and other traditional bands, landing in more progressive groups such as David Grisman, Bela Fleck, and modern ‘old time’ like John Hartford and Andrew Marlin. Participants will learn about these different styles of music and what makes them unique, but part of the same fabric. We will also discuss the role of each instrument in the group and how that creates the whole sound you experience. There will be plenty of music involved. The Splinters, a bluegrass and old-time string band from Massachusetts, deliver a relentless groove to accompany their tight 3-part harmonies. Tom Pritchard (fiddle) brings the heat to his fiddle playing. J Johnson (mandolin) adds a jazzy flair to his breaks. Chris Reckling (guitar, banjo) picks solid rhythm and punchy leads on top of Garrett Wallace’s grooving bass fiddle. A Splinters set veers from straight ahead bluegrass to traditional fiddle tunes and back, with the occasional detour into a modern song. They released their first album as a quartet, “Grey Owl”. Their second album, “In the Pale Moonlight“, was released in August, 2023. Both are available on all major streaming platforms and on Bandcamp.

Southern Rail's concerts are high octane exuberant fun with stunning harmonies, irrepressible good humor and sparkling banjo, guitar and mandolin. Their repertoire is fresh and diverse, featuring lots of originals plus a kaleidoscope of cover.  There will be a special concert dinner menu which is outstanding!  Reservations are recommended as the room fills up quickly.

On her new album, City of Gold, Molly Tuttle — joined by her band Golden Highway — shares a batch of spellbinding stories that span time and place: wildly colorful fables populated by gold miners and fortune tellers, true-to-life tales of love and loss and a fast-changing world, and a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland set in the backwoods of Kentucky, to name just a few. The follow-up to 2022’s Crooked Tree—a widely lauded LP that won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album, with Tuttle earning a Best New Artist nomination—the Northern California-raised musician’s fourth full-length album brings those narratives to a resplendent form of bluegrass rooted in her virtuosic guitar playing. This time around, the Nashville-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist chose to record with her live band — Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle, vocals), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Kyle Tuttle (banjo, vocals), and Shelby Means (bass, vocals) — for the first time, lending a potent new energy to her exquisitely crafted sound.