BREAKING BLUEGRASS NEWS!!!
Lee Highway is hanging up the hats!
After six great years of picking and singing, Lee Highway has decided to retire from the music scene. We've shared some really good times, traveled through some great country and made a lot of new friends along the way.
We'd like to thank all of you: fans, promoters, sound personnel, festival volunteers, emcees and friends, new and old, for making us feel so welcome
at our performances.
And…
We want you to know that we had a ball playing for you!
Your friends,
Rich, Mike & Mike, David, Sue & John
Program note:
Lee Highways remaining scheduled performance will be on
Saturday, May 14th from 2pm to 3pm
At the Wilsonville Library 8200 Wilsonville Road in you guessed it Wilsonville! (zip 97070)
Vuvuzela jam session to follow (just kidding, of course)
- Old-time music lovers and pickers, let me share my trembling heart. I went to a bluegrass house concert that I will never recover from. I swoon!... The salts!... The band, Lee Highway, is it. They are... the finest traditional style bluegrass band I've ever heard live. As one of them said, they manifest "Hobbies Gone Wild!" They are all the cream of the scene, topnotch instrumental technicians (outstanding bass), lovingly self-schooled in the older sounds and aesthetic, encyclopedic in their knowledge, creative, spontaneous. Second best of all, they live, artistically, in the 1940s-50s of bluegrass and country that gets the ole argyles to furl. First best, I've never heard a musical ensemble calmly, confidently, joyfully hit the ground running with each tune or song.
The entire group was tight together, on the beat, full beautiful orchestration and sound displaying, up to speed and nailing it. Every note thereafter shone and glittered right where they left it nailed dead on the mark. Hell, my argyles were hanging up on my goosebumps!
- Bill Martin, writer and publisher of
bubbaguitar.com and the newsletter Old-Time Music in Portland June 2009
- Regarding "Bluegrass Music" and "When He Reached Down His Hand For Me", Al Shusterman of KCBL in Sacramento, CA says: "The songs in these cds are the "real deal". "From the first note of each project until the last note is completed, both of these projects just barrel ahead at 100mph. Many of the songs on these projects are bluegrass classics and you have given them new life."
- Al Shusterman, Backroads Bluegrass Show
KCBL Radio, Sacramento, CA
- "If an audience loves PURE, TRADITIONAL
Bluegrass music,
Lee Highway is there to deliver it. With tight vocals, high-level instrumentals and fantastic stage presence,
Lee Highway works it's way through their set-list with the confidence and ease!The audience can always count on a fantastic show from
Lee Highway."
- Sharon Sandgren, Bluegrass Concert Producer
Gresham Little Theater and Troutdale Bite and
Bluegrass. May 2006
- Now here is a band to be reckoned with. Rich's vocals just knock me out. He sounds like Lester Flatt when Lester was very young and in his prime. Between John Averill burning it up on the mandolin and delivering those great high tenor harmonies and Mike Eislers "eat your heart out Kenny Baker/Buddy Spicher fiddling," you had to ask yourself, how could they do better than that. Up steps Mike Stahlman on the banjo and just played the perfect Earl Scruggs banjo licks; and his back-up banjo is second to nobody's. If that wasn't enough, he picks up the guitar and does 4 great old Earl Scruggs guitar oriented songs, that you could close your eyes and swear it was Earl on the guitar. Holding it all together was the other great female bass player in the
Pacific Northwest, Sue Averill, John's wife.
-
Ken Cartwright,
Oregon
Bluegrass Newsletter February 2007
- Having been raised in
Virginia and
West Virginia, I listened to the old time roots style bluegrass for years. My friends, you have taken me back to that era and in style! The vocals and harmony were outstanding and the musical talents of your group are awesome. Please let Mike Eisler know that I have never heard better fiddle playing in all of my 58 years on this planet.
- David and Carol Bridges,
Portland, Or. January 2007