Coming just a week after DelFest, the 9th Annual Nelsonville Music Festival is set for May 30-June 2, 2013  in the beautiful rolling hills of Southeastern Ohio, and just a few miles up the road from Ohio University in Athens, where, I like to remind folks, the 1960's never went away. 

Set on the campus of the Hocking College, the festival expands to four days and, so that the weather may be less of an unpredictable factor, has been…

"What is jazz? Man, if you have to ask you'll never know." Louis Armstrong

In the early summer of 1969 I Greyhounded to Philadelphia to visit a musician friend, hear some music and see some foreign movies.  The intended two week stay turned into nearly a year and a half. We knocked around the folk and jazz clubs, sometimes hitching rides  to New York. My buddy was an aspiring singer-songwriter whose real talent later was revealed to be one of the finest finish carpenters in…

(Cover of the 1976 album on Flying Fish)

In between Uncle Josh Graves and  Jerry Douglas, there was Mike Auldridge, the preeminent dobro player of his day. Now, unfortunately, his long day has closed. Just one day prior to his 74th birthday, he died on December 29 in hospice care in Silver Spring, Maryland after a battle with cancer.

He was a founding member of  The Seldom Scene  and was an integral part of the acoustic music melting pot of the 1970's that  fused …

While we all have lists in our heads for numerous things, the first time I did one for publication was in 1973 while I was in college and writing for a Philadelphia paper . That list included, in random order, John Martyn's Solid Air, Tom Waits' Closing Time, Jackson Browne's For Everyman, Bonnie Raitt's Takin' My Time, Maria Muldaur's first solo album, Willie Nelson's Shotgun Willie, Waylon Jennings' Lonesome Onry & Mean, John Prine's Sweet Revenge  and Loudon Wainwright's…

I first heard Emmylou Harris quite by accident on the radio station WBAI  in 1970 while visiting New York for my writing gig in Philadelphia. It was a short set, perhaps just 30 minutes or so in the studio, but what piqued my interest at first was that David Bromberg was backing her up (whom I had met at the Philly Folk Fest the year before). But what hooked me was she did a song by Townes Van Zandt, whom I had also first met/seen in 1969. She was the first person I had ever heard…