Upcoming Bluegrass Related Events

Southern Rail will fill South Boston Carhouse at Seashore Trolley Museum with an exuberant blend of upbeat bluegrass and riveting vocals on Saturday, October 26. This event promises to be a full house, featuring lush harmonies, irrepressible good humor, and sparkling banjo, guitar, mandolin and bass, all with antique trolleys in the background. Come early to browse the wonderful exhibits and to take an evening trolley ride! Those who would like to also join us for dinner, you’re in for a treat! Seashore Fan Favorite For The Love of Food & Drink will be providing dinner in between the trolley ride and the concert as an option to our event guests. 4:30PM: Evening trolley ride departs from the museum’s Visitors Center. 5PM: Dinner by For The Love of Food & Drink is served inside the museum’s Exhibit Room, inside the Visitors Center. If the weather is right, enjoy dinner just outside the Exhibit Room on the trolley boarding platform. 5:30PM-7:30PM: Southern Rail performs inside the museum’s South Boston Carhouse, a short walk or trolley ride from the Visitors Center. Parking is available next to South Boston Carhouse for those with mobility challenges. There will be a 15-minute intermission with a trolley shuttle available to bring guests to restrooms in the Visitors Center. Ticket options include the following: Trolley Ride, Dinner & Southern Rail Concert (4:30PM) Adults: $40 Youth Under 12: $25 Children Under 3: Free Just the Southern Rail Concert (5:30PM) Adults: $20 Youth Under 12: $10 Children Under 3: Free

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.  

Bluegrass supergroup Mr Sun performs a new interpretation of Ellington’s legendary Nutcracker Suite! If you haven’t heard of the cheerfully named supergroup Mr Sun, you’ve certainly heard its proponents, four of the finest musicians on the American roots scene: Renowned fiddler Darol Anger, Professor Emeritus at Berklee College of Music, who has released many solo albums in addition to his work with David Grisman and Mike Marshall, and founded the Turtle Island Quartet, Psychograss, and Republic of Strings; Joe K. Walsh, mandolin virtuoso and vocalist who spent four years with the award-winning bluegrass act the Gibson Brothers before becoming solo artist and songwriter and Strings Department Professor at Berklee; all-around guitar genius Grant Gordy, a former member of Dawg Music guru David Grisman’s band; and the phenomenal Scots bassist Aidan O’Connell, who has backed harpist Maeve Gilchrist and countless modern Jazz heroes.