Please review the following information before contacting us – you may find your answers here, and certainly more quickly than waiting for us to respond!
We don’t provide any recordings of the songs here. There are copyright infringement issues, of course, as well as the logistical challenge. In general, recordings of these songs can easily be found via a quick search on iTunes, Amazon, etc. Recommended sources for bluegrass recordings include Down Home Records in El Cerrito CA, Elderly Instruments in Lansing Michigan, and County Sales online.
Sorry, no tablature or written notation. Our thinkin’ is that the best way to learn bluegrass is to go out and buy as many old bluegrass recordings as you can and sit and listen to them. This way you can catch the nuances (is that a bluegrass word?) of the style – melody, phrasing, and musical accompaniment style. The lyrics here are just a helper for those of us who are memory-challenged.
Unfortunately, no. We recommend researching the author of the song, their associated publishing agency or label, and finding out about how to provide the appropriate licensing fees.
Likely not. We are going to try and get everything on the site as we assemble it, and there are just too many songs out there. However, we are hoping to start up a community forum tool here shortly, which would be a perfect place to find that song you heard mom sing but only know a few words.
YES! If you have lyrics for bluegrass, old-time or early/traditional country songs that you don’t see already listed here, please use our “contribute” form to either paste in the lyrics, or attach a word doc. Please note: we do not publish any lyrics that aren’t within these genres, and we also will likely not publish any “originals” (songs you may have written). Thanks!
Cause I’m lame. Getting there though. I have like 500 emails about some really lamo stuff (on my part), and some more emails from angry songwriters whose names aren’t listed here. The site can actually be edited now, so we should be cranking though this as well as adding a lot more material. We have hundreds more songs transcribed.
This is a non-profit site, which has never included ad banners of any kind, and we do it because we love each and every one of you individually. If you’d like to help out, we certainly accept contributions via PayPal. We may at some point add a banner or two from folks we really like, like MandolinCafe or Elderly Instruments, or County Sales or some such. Dunno.
Well, it’s mostly me, John Kael, but I’ve had support and help from many fine friends, including but not limited to:
- Matt Vanderpol – web guy extraordinaire and all around technical wizard. If you’re interested in his services his site is https://mattvanderpol.com/
- Ken Torke – helped with the original database, and for those of you into Old-Time music, he hosts an awesome resource site here http://taterjoes.com/
- Annie Staninec (she’s been helping load some lyrics and make edits)
- All you folks