Jim McReynolds, the guitar-playing half of Grand Ole Opry and IBMA Hall of Honor members Jim & Jesse, died of cancer in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 31, 2002. He was 75 years old. With his passing, country music’s longest active professional brother duet came to an end. Born and raised in southwestern Virginia, Jim and [...]

Beecher Ray “Pete” Kirby, known to country music fans as Bashful Brother Oswald, died October 17. He was 90. Oswald was largely responsible for popularizing use of the dobro in country and bluegrass music, though in his long tenure as a member of Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys, he also played clawhammer banjo and guitar [...]

Multi-instrumentalist Derek Bell, a member of Irish band the Chieftains since the early 1970s, died in mid-October at age 66. Bell played harp, oboe, hammered dulcimer and other instruments with the group, and is featured on more than 30 of the band’s albums, including the recent Down The Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions, a [...]

Horace Logan, founding producer of the influential Louisiana Hayride country radio show, died October 13 at age 86. Logan started the Hayride on Shreveport’s KWKH-AM in 1948; among the artists who played the show on their way up were Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley. After one of Presley’s Hayride performances, Logan sought to [...]

Dave “Snaker” Ray, best known for his work with the pioneering folk-blues trio Koerner, Ray & Glover, died November 28 of cancer. He was 59. Ray, Spider John Koerner and Tony Glover attended college together at the University of Minnesota and in 1963 released their debut album, Blues, Rags And Hollers, which influenced many artists [...]

Lonnie Donegan, known as the father of 1950s British “skiffle” music which influenced the Beatles and others in the following decade, died November 3. He was 71. Donegan started out as a jazz musician but was intrigued by the American music he heard on international radio while in the British Army. Eventually he began melding [...]

Tom Dowd, whose producer and engineer credits numbered in the hundreds and ranged across American musical styles from rock to pop to soul to R&B to jazz to southern rock and beyond, died October 27. He was 77. Dowd produced or engineered records for an astounding assortment of performers, among them Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, [...]

“The dancing stops, but the music goes on.” In the deepest blue of night, in the wee hours of September 29th, Mickey Newbury drifted off to dream at his home in rural Oregon, and never came back. His passing was no surprise, as he’d been battling a severe respiratory illness for many years. At 62, [...]

Two weeks before his father died, John Farrar, the eldest son of James Paul Farrar, asked the question every son one day will face. “What should we do, Pops?” His father had been diagnosed with cancer over a year ago; though he was known to be “terminal,” as he would say, his will made no [...]

In 1997, at age 82, Alan Lomax signed a contract with Rounder Records that called for the release of over 100 albums of his life’s work. Rounder planned to methodically digitize, organize and release Alan’s field recordings, made from the 1930s to the 1990s, including much unreleased material. They have issued about 80 CDs to [...]