The Clinch Mountain Echo website was started early in 2016 as an attempt to 'put something back', having enjoyed listening to bluegrass music over the last decade, and in particular the first generation acts like Bill Monroe, Jimmy Martin, early Flatt & Scruggs and of course the Stanley Brothers.

I don't make any claims about being an expert or anything - I'm just a fan of Ralph Stanley and 'old-time mountain what they call bluegrass' music... And proper traditional bluegrass music it seems to me, is the world's best kept secret... (Or at least it is outside of the USA)

I only stumbled across 'Bluegrass' music in July 2006, when I bought an acoustic guitar at Hobgoblin in Leeds & the sales assistant proffered a couple of instruction books. One had tab for pop-hits like Rod Stewart's Sailing (which I hated), whilst the other included Sitting On Top Of The World, which I had at least heard on an old Grateful Dead record - so I opted for the later:- Bert Casey's Acoustic Guitar for Beginners. It turned out to be a gold mine as it mentioned something called 'bluegrass' which I'd never really heard of before (or at least if I had, it had never sunk in).

Intrigued & wanting to find out what this thing called 'bluegrass' was, a few months later I picked up a 4-CD box set on ebay for £1 called Bluegrass Bonanza. On this, the Bill Monroe tracks really stuck out, so I then got a dodgy best-of CD with 70 mins of his classic out-of-copyright material from the 1940s...

By 2009, my instrument collection had expanded to include a mandolin & a cheap banjo and I was eagerly digesting the excellent Bill Monroe Bear Family Box sets. Then I discovered that people were still playing this 'bluegrass' thing, which was quite revelatory, even more so that there was a regular bluegrass club with performances here in Leeds.

Even better came the news that Ralph Stanley was playing in the UK! At that point I didn't have any Ralph Stanley albums other than the Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers and O Brother CDs, but had caught some clips from the 'Cumberland Highlanders' TV show. So we travelled 220 miles down from Leeds & caught the 29 May concert in Bath (which can be found on youtube) - my first proper bluegrass show...

At the local Leeds Bluegrass Club, I was advised by Kevin Garrett to start with the first generation bands and also to listen to live recordings & soon began to soak up all I could find on the internet, as well as buying CDs by Jimmy Martin, Country Gents, Ralph Stanley, etc.

The shift towards appreciating the Stanley style more was largely down to Gary Reid's excellent 'Stanley Series' of live Stanley Brothers shows, as well as an increasing fascination with Ralph Stanley's machine-gun style of banjo pickin', which sounded different to the more common Scruggs & Melodic styles. I was also fortunate to have been given a copy of Steve Sparkman's Stanley Style Banjo by my wife at the 2009 Bath show.

By 2013 I'd gathered quite a collection of live recordings from various internet sources which had since disappeared, so I contacted Fred Robbins (who has an amazing archive of live material from various contributors on his website). Fred kindly hosted some of these.

In Feb 2016 I came across mention of a 17 minute live recording of Ralph which looks like it may be the last performance with Roy Lee Centers. Fred declined hosting it, over concern about the source name (Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger blogspot), so I decided to bite the bullet and start this website...