In 1988, Frets magazine, "The Magazine for Acoustic String Musicians" featured a smiling Richard Thompson on its cover. It also...

One of the best experiences in the research for Pluck happened whenever I found an obscure source that opened many more lines of...

Remember the old Reader's Digest recurring series, "My Most Unforgettable Character"? Well, Neal Hellman is in my Top Ten list of most...

Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music recently held its 75th Anniversary Party, and I felt fortunate to be invited. It was a most...

If you're not sure what a "Nudie suit" is in the context of country music, you might want to read here before you start reading this...

There was hardly a piece of research for Pluck that didn't yield useful information for telling David's story. Ironically, one of the...

Today I want to write to you about this lovely woman, Nancy Barker. She is one of the reasons that the subtitle for Pluck reads, "The...

Crawling back from the misery of a very bad cold, I have been catching up with emails. A few in particular came from Tom Harleman who...

One of David's most endearing songs is "Sarah", based on a real person named Sarah Melton. He loved the 1911 backstory so much that he...

In my last post, I wrote about "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood". I heard it for the very first time earlier this week. Bob Force had...

The first time I visited the Schnaufer archive at Vanderbilt University was several years before I ever had an inkling I would plunge...

Once upon a time, the scruffy, west coast hippies who called themselves the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band broached the subject of collaborating...

Jan Pulsford was one of the biggest surprises of all the people who informed the research for Pluck. She is Welsh-born, but lives and...

Toward the end of Pluck, you'll read about David and Butch Baldassari's interview and performance on the 2005 radio program, "Wood Songs...

In a recent blog post on a different topic, I shared a video of two of David's young students/collaborators performing "Hey Little...

When I started the Pluck Blog, I envisioned putting up posts that followed the chronology of Pluck, but I've made an executive decision...

I am struck as I type this how easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking everything is awful after reading the news. How easy it would...

Emmylou Harris and David Schnaufer perform Hank Williams's "May You Never Be Alone".

Why him? Why did David Schnaufer spend years writing to Chet Atkins during the seventies--out of all the important music movers and...

A few days ago, David Beede posted a clip of Cyndi Lauper on Everything Dulcimer. The video is from her 2008 appearance on the Howard...