Murphy Method Banjo Camp this Weekend

Folks, the Murphy Method Beginning Banjo Camp is this weekend! We'll have students coming in from all over the country to learn from Murphy and Casey. This is our first camp specifically for beginners, so both Murphy and Casey will be teaching, demonstrating, and encouraging new banjo players for three days. And what use, you…

The New “Banjo Backup for Fiddle” DVD is now available!

Folks, we are very happy to announce that our long-awaited new DVD, "Banjo Backup for Fiddle", is now available for your order by TELEPHONE only (we haven't had time to put it on the site!). [Actually, now it IS on the site... just follow this link.] Call us at 800-227-2357 ! I'll be at the…

A Busy Weekend of Picking

Folks, what's the easiest and most enjoyable kind of practice? Naturally, it's the kind that doesn't seem like practice at all: PLAYING music. So I got a lot of easy practice last weekend. Friday night, there was Old-Time picking at the Cabin. That's the "Cabin" with a capital C, the one where the Old-Time pickers…

Fruit Stripe Gum

If I could just share one more memory from my dad’s funeral.....You will remember that Daddy was a doctor. And for many of the years in which he practiced medicine, penicillin was the go-to drug and it was administered in the form of a shot. With a shot needle. In the butt. And it hurt…

Walking West To Memphis

In the midst of everything else that’s been happening in my life, in the lives of our family, I don’t want to forget to give you the follow-up about son Chris’s song, "Walking West to Memphis." As I told you, it was nominated for IBMA Song of the Year. Well, as it turned it, Chris’s…

Eulogy For Daddy

My father, Loy Grover Hicks, Jr., died Sunday September 25, 2011, at the age of 86. I was so fortunate to have been at his bedside along with my four sisters and his caregiver, Karen Alexander. We were, in fact, in Karen’s home in Habersham County, Georgia, where Daddy had lived the last four months…