Banjo Licks

Seasick Steve has been playing music all his life although he didn't start making a living at it until he was in his early sixties. He was born in Oakland, and took guitar lessons from K.C. Douglas who wrote the standard "Mercury Blues." He traveled the world busking, played as a session guitarist, and was befriended by Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell in the '60s. In the '80s, he produced the first Modest Mouse album This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. He moved to Norway with his wife and family in 2001, and started recording his quirky blues tunes on an old four-track tape machine.

Seasick Steve has been playing music all his life although he didn't start making a living at it until he was in his early sixties. He was born in Oakland, and took guitar lessons from K.C. Douglas who wrote the standard "Mercury Blues." He traveled the world busking, played as a session guitarist, and was befriended by Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell in the '60s. In the '80s, he produced the first Modest Mouse album This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. He moved to Norway with his wife and family in 2001, and started recording his quirky blues tunes on an old four-track tape machine. After a heart attack, he got serious about his career and cut Dog House Music, which sold over 200,000 copies with little promotion. An appearance on Jools Holland's BBC TV show, helped his next record, I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, go platinum in England…

Premier banjo player Béla Fleck is considered one of the most innovative pickers in the world and has done much to demonstrate the versatility of his instrument, which he uses to play everything from traditional bluegrass to progressive jazz. He was named after composer Béla Bartok and was born in New York City. Around age 15, Fleck became fascinated with the banjo after hearing Flatt & Scruggs' "Ballad of Jed Clampett" and Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell's "Dueling Banjos," and his grandfather soon gave him one. While attending the High School of Music and Art in New York, Fleck worked on adapting bebop music for the banjo.

Even among the pantheon of music’s finest artists, Del McCoury stands alone. From the nascent sound of bluegrass that charmed hardscrabble hillbilly honkytonks, rural schoolhouse stages, and the crowning glory of the Grand Ole Opry to the present-day culture-buzz of viral videos and digital streams, Del is the living link. On primetime and late-night television talk shows, there is Del. From headlining sold-out concerts to music festivals of all genres, including one carrying his namesake, there is Del. Where audiences number in the tens of thousands, and admirers as diverse as country-rock icon Steve Earle and jamband royalty Phish count as two among hundreds, there is Del.

For the benefit of the geographically challenged, the Bering Strait is the stretch of water, 55 miles across at its narrowest, between western Alaska and eastern Siberia, the place where the U.S. and Russia come the closest to connecting. In fact, since it is frozen over more than half the year, it's the point at which the two countries do connect. The name is an appropriate one, then, to be taken by a Russian group playing Western-style country music….