We feel sorry for anybody who packed up and left the 78th Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival early.
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Category: Reviews
Dispatch from Gettysburg, where Saturday night felt a lot like being home
At its heart, the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival is a more traditional event, and Saturday evening’s slate sort of represented that.
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Friday’s Dispatch from Gettysburg: The one where we learn all about Weston, W Va.
Wikipedia may not be the most authoritative source in the world, but where else are you going to go to find out a little about Weston, W. Va.? There is an official site for this “city” of 4,110 people. But it mostly deals with the local government. Wikipedia, though, tells us a little more about the town. For instance, Weston, which is about an hour south of Morgantown, was founded in 1818. Stonewall Jackson was[…]
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Dispatch from Gettysburg: Only thing better than Thursday’s weather was the music
Seems like it was just last year. Probably because it was. It seemed to rain every weekend in the spring and summer of 2018. We called it “Festival Season,” but truth be told, it was more like monsoon season. Looking back, it seemed like there was only one truly perfect weather day — the Saturday of Grey Fox, when it was bright, sunny, dry, and perfect shirtsleeves weather. It was a Goldilocks day — not[…]
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Don’t Let Title Cut Fool You, Infamous Stringdusters’ Latest Album Shines
Someday, a few years down the road, some of these songs will be standards in Stringdusters’ sets. And some will be forgotten . . .
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“Tim O’Brien Band” LP is a 13-song Bluegrass Tour-de-Force
“Tim O’Brien Band,” his first album with his current band, might just be his finest effort since Red on Blonde, his iconic 1996 bluegrass tribute to Bob Dylan’s music.
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OK We’ll Say It: We Really, Really like Mile Twelve’s new album
When you review an album, you need to listen to it a number of times. So it is not necessarily unusual that we’ve listened to Mile Twelve’s upcoming release, “City on a Hill,” enough in the past few weeks that we can sing along to all the songs. But we’ve listened to this one far more than we do for most reviews. Yes, because it is that good, though that was not exactly our motivation.[…]
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Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen Turn Up the Heat With Latest Album
If you were fortunate enough to see Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen live in 2018, chances are a lot of the songs on the band’s recent release, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” might sound a little familiar. There is a good reason for that. The band recorded the album, released in January of this year, last March. A lot of the songs on it have been on FSDK’s set lists since then. Of course[…]
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Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen Cook Up a Smoking Hot Sunday Roast
FSDK delivers jammy set as they celebrate 10 years as a band with a two-day live recording run in Westminster, Md. Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen had just finished Lena (Leah By Permission), a song off of the new album, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” when bass player Jeremy Middletown launched into the very familiar bass riff of “Whipping Post.” The crowd, there for Solivan’s bluegrass stylings, thought it was a joke. Why not?[…]
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New Lineup Helps Make Jakobs Ferry Stragglers’ “Poison River” One of 2018’s Top New Releases
Officially, the Jakobs Ferry Stragglers 2018 release “Poison RIver” is the band’s third album. In a lot of ways, though, it feels like a debut effort. Originally formed in 2014, the Stragglers’ sound has always been built around the vocals of founding members Gary Antol and Libby Eddy. That does not change on “Poison River.” What does change on this release, and for the better, is the makeup of the rest of the band. With[…]
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