This week our podcast features Jerry Salley.  Jerry has a long history as an award-winning songwriter in bluegrass, country, and gospel music.  He is also a record producer and one of the founders of Billy Blue Records.  Additionally, he is a talented performing and recording artist.  We will be talking with Jerry Salley about his songwriting, his work at Billy Blue Records, and his new album.

This week were feature mandolin and bass player Sharon Gilchrist and talk with her about her early days learning bluegrass in Texas, her time studying mandolin at Belmont University in Nashville, her work with Tony Rice and Peter Rowan, and the Harmonic Tone Revealers album she recorded with John Reischman and Scott Nygaard.

This podcast is a special podcast that we are adding this week because the legendary bluegrass fiddler Byron Berline passed away a couple of weeks ago.  After Byron’s passing a radio host from Kansas, Orin Friesen sent us an interview that he conducted with Byron at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, in 1981.  In this podcast you will hear Byron talk about his pre-1981 life in bluegrass music.

This week's podcast features longtime bluegrass writer, educator, performer, and recording artist Jack Tottle.  Today we talk with Jack about his early life in bluegrass, his work founding the bluegrass music program at ETSU and some of the things that keep him busy these days, including the new CD release that features material he and Tim Stafford recorded in the late 1980s.

This week we are talking with Frank Solivan of Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen.  Today we talk with Frank about his time spent in the Navy as a member of the Navy bluegrass band Country Current, what kept him busy during the pandemic, and what we can look forward to from the band in the near future. 

This week's podcast features Tina Adair of Sister Sadie.  In our July 2020 issue we included a group of articles about college bluegrass music programs.  For the past 18 years Tina has worked at Belmont University in Nashville in the Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business.  We will talk with Tina about her work at Belmont, and about her brand new self-titled solo album.  You will also get to hear a couple of cuts from that album.

This week we are talking with Steve Swan about the bass because June is our annual instrument issue month and although just about every bluegrass band has a bass, the bass is an instrument that doesn’t get as much attention as the other instruments in the band.  We felt like that instrument deserves a little more attention and we know that Steve Swan is a guy who can answer any and all questions related to the bass.  If you want to know more about the standup bass, this is the podcast for you.

This week's podcast features Tom Nechville of Nechville Musical Products.   Nechville is known for their innovative banjo designs and today we talk with Tom about some of his ideas about banjo construction and design, the products Nechville offers, the different models of banjos that are in their catalog, and their new operation in Sisters, Oregon.

This week we talk with multi-instrumentalist David McLaughlin.  David is best known as the mandolin player for the Johnson Mountain Boys and as such was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in the fall of 2020. Today we talk with David about his role in Christopher Henry’s Monroe Style Improvisation Course, about his musically rich upbringing in the Washington, D.C. area, about his relationship with Bill Monroe, and much more.

This week's podcast features Christopher Henry, son of the talented musicians and instructors Red and Murphy Henry and brother to bluegrass banjo player and teacher Casey Henry.  Christopher has performed with his family, has fronted his own band and has been a member of Peter Rowan’s bluegrass band for the past six or seven years.  Today we are talking with Christopher about his online Monroe Style Improvisation course that was featured in the June 2021 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine.