Mostly Music Covers

The MonkeesThis is an updated repost from Dec. 18, 2018

For a TV series that ran for only two years (1966-68) albeit 58 episodes, it has had a significant effect on music, even today. I recall 'sneaking' as my father was very much against us watching such "garbage" with two of my sisters to watch the shows on Saturday morning reruns. I tried watching a couple of episodes recently, it's about a wacky group of guys struggling to make it in the music business, and apart from the music my father was not all wrong. However, for the time period it was great entertainment for tweens and teens especially and that demographic bought their records-lots of them. In fact about 75 million records to date. The demise of the silly TV show was due to a backlash regarding the 'manufactured' nature of the band itself and a change in the format in season two, the ratings dropped and that was it. The TV show was gone and all that was left was a lot of great songs and by now…

Bluegrass

History of Bluegrass
If we look at the roots of Bluegrass music, it most certainly begins in large part with the arrival of Scottish and Irish immigrants to the area known as Appalachia as early as the late 1600s, but in greater numbers from about 1720 throughout the 1800s. Appalachia is part of the Appalachian Mountains which geographically extend from Newfoundland to Alabama for over 2000 miles. It seems the name Appalachia and Appalachian have become somewhat interchangeable. You can see the area on the map inset below.
However, the cultural and musical region related to Bluegrass is pretty much confined to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the Smokey Mountains on the Tennessee and North Carolina border. So I will refer to this region by it's name of Appalachia, sorry I'm no geographer, bottom line this is where Bluegrass originated!
The instruments transported by these early immigrants were almost exclusively string based. For the most part this was the fiddle …