This site is maintained by Charley Pennell, a library cataloguer by trade, currently at the D. H. Hill Library, North Carolina State University. Address enquiries, additions and corrections to: bluegrassdiscography@gmail.com. If you have documentation for any corrections to discographical information contained herein, my postal address is: 1409 Bloomingdale Drive, Cary, NC 27511-5953

Please note: Since I often receive email messages about the availability of the recordings listed herein, I offer the following disclaimer: these recordings are not being offered for sale by the compiler, who actually has but a small percentage of these recordings in his collection! A list of possible sources for both current and out-of-print singles, LPs, tapes and CDs is presented to help those of you who wish to either purchase or sell recordings identified in these pages. The label listing on this site also includes links to recording companies where these are known. No endorsement of either the publishers or vendors listed is intended.

Work like this is never done alone. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to the information presented here, either directly through email or letter contact, or indirectly through liner notes, published discographies (especially those beautiful Bear Family ones!), postings to BGRASS-L and rec.music.country.old-time, or reviews in Bluegrass Unlimited, the County Sales Newsletter, the Old Time Herald, or other periodicals.

Special big thanks are offered to Frank Godbey, listowner of BGRASS-L, who kindly sent me a copy of his index to over 2800 reviews published in Bluegrass Unlimited between 1966-1983. The late French mandolinist and record collector Mick Larie is also to be thanked for his unsolicited contribution of an Excel spreadsheet with over 4000 bluegrass CDs, including about 800 missing from my own database, plus the continuing flow of data on both European and U.S. CD releases up until his death in 2007. This was a tremendous help, both in identifying European releases that I had not heard about, but also in cross-checking my work on U.S. releases. Mick, you will be missed! John Boothroyd's massive print discography of bluegrass LPs formed the basis for much of the LP coverage listed here. A special big thanks to Fred Bartenstein for sending me his copy of Boothroyd and also for connecting me up with Tony Fuld in Georgia, who contributed a spreadsheet of over 47,000 song titles from both LPs and CDs!

A particularly heart-felt thank-you is extended to Neil V. Rosenberg, the "Phantom Discographer", now retired from the Dept. of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland who, besides offering me much needed moral support for this project, contributed materially by allowing me access to his voluminous collection of 45s, 78s, and LPs (some of which are pictured on these pages), the Boothroyd discography (for over a year!), as well to the many bits of discographies-in-progress filed away within the Rosenberg household archives. In particular, I am grateful for the loan of his transcripts from the long years he wrote the "Thirty years ago this month" column for Bluegrass Unlimited. Neil's discographical liner notes on RCA LPV-569 (Early Blue Grass) and the now long out-of-print Monroe discography, a copy of which he gave me back in the late 1970s, was the immediate impetus for all of my subsequent work and I expect for the work which resulted in the Stanley Brothers, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, various Bear Family, and other bluegrass discographies which have been produced since. The bluegrass community owes much to Neil's discographical efforts.

Here are some of you who have helped out directly or indirectly on this project:

Mark Anderson
Fred Bartenstein (Yellow Springs, OH)
John Boothroyd (Australia)
Terry Cox (CO)
Sue Cunningham
John Currie (NC)
Ruth Downes
Ivo Drbohlav (Prague, Czech Republic)
Richard Dress (USA)
Rick Fowler (Nashville, TN)
Peter Fraissinet (NY)
Tony Fuld (GA)
Frank Godbey (Lexington, KY)
Pieter Groenveld (Hoofdorp, Nederlands)
Al Hawkes (Westbrook, ME)
Thomas Knowles
Matt Levine
Mick Larie (France)
Patrick Mathe (UK)
Milt Pappas (NC)
Tom Payne (Arcata, CA)
Benjamin & Daniel Pennell (Cary, NC)
Guy Rains (USA)
Doug Ranking (Mountain Rest, SC)
Neil V. Rosenberg (St. John's, NF, Canada)
John Ryba (Bay Minette, AL)
David B. Schlosser (Austin, TX)
Dennis Schut (Nederlands)
Steve Silverstein (US)
Scott Street (Richmond, VA)
Peter Thompson (San Francisco, CA)
Lubomir Toman (Slovak Republic)
Steve Treadaway (SC)
Donald Wermuth (Nederlands)
Mark Wingate

Monthly site use statistics
  Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Mo avg Day avg
2001 1740 2219 3371 4312 10179 5252 6692 5828 2964 11948 16904 11919 6944 228
2002 13479 8830 13429 13404 9331 5804 6152 6558 9690 9059 6489 7488 9143 301
2003 18751 18929 18774 22715 20245 18841 21279 26813 20311 31918 32740 40499 32424 799
2004 54850 49342 51105 49790 52289 48824 50957 52352 52694 38054 65222 53970 51621 1692
2005 78947 74909 85833 89685 88904 80658 72035 93483 102632 110839 110668 109752 91195 2998
2006 118940 96495 113226 60761 110484 110219 101886 105104 69972 111028 117956 120705 103066 3388
2007 131836 113803 123563 146471 120306 120291 121023 98491         121973 4016

Last modified: 2 September 2007
Revised by: Charley Pennell
URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/hillwilliam/BGdiscography/about.htm