Jim Van Cleve – Mountain Heart

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of two blogs written exclusively for BluegrassJournal.com by members of Mountain Heart, which is gearing up for an appearance at the BamaJam Music Festival that takes place June 5-7 in Enterprise, AL. The author here is reknown fiddler and Mountain Heart charter member Jim Van Cleve. Next week’s installment will feature comments and observations from another member of the group.

This has been a wildly exciting year thus far in Mountain Heart land.

In the last eight months, we have added two new members to the band, and couldn’t be more pumped about the music we’re making together, not to mention the great response that it’s been getting at the concerts! The new guys are a Grammy-winning guitarist, Clay Hess, and a young mandolin phenom, Aaron Ramsey. The energy and enthusiasm, and even youth that they’ve brought to the MH mix has been awesome!

Mountain Heart will appear at the BamaJam Music Festival on Saturday, June 7, 2008 in Enterprise, Alabama along with Blue Highway, Dan Tyminski, The Del McCoury Band and Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder.

We have just recently started booking an upcoming tour with an undisputed musical legend, Tony Rice. He is to acoustic bluegrass guitar as Earl Scruggs was to the banjo, and is a hero to all of us.

The idea for the tour came about as a result of a few extremely successful co-bills we did with Tony, and now that it’s all coming together, we are just beyond excited!

We’ve been working up a ton of fresh material for a brand new studio project lately, and will probably be debuting some of these songs at BamaJam!

Speaking of BamaJam, what a lineup: Ricky Skaggs, Del McCoury, Blue Highway, Ralph Stanley–the list goes on!! We are usually very enthusiastic during any of our concerts…but at a show like BamaJam, you can be assured that everything will be turned up a few notches by all the bands involved! We are ready to rock! :)

–Jim Van Cleve