Bluegrass Jam Along

Bluegrass Jam Along
Host	Matt Hutchinson
Website	Official site
RSS	Feed
YouTube	Playlist

Produces short briefings approximately weekly, and about 1-3 longer form interviews each month.

Although not in the RSS feeds, the podcast also includes backing tracks for some bluegrass standard tunes.

The Bluegrass Jam Along website does not display a license at the bottom, so it is not known whether the podcast and related materials are provided as Creative Commons or public domain content.

Latest Episodes

• Note: The RSS feed for this podcast has historically been malformed at times; if the feed is properly formatted XML, it will appear below. If not, it may cause an error.

Failed to load RSS feed from https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1660894.rss: Error parsing XML for RSS

Guest name patterns

These are used by the Bluegrass Podcast Firehose to pull guest names out of episode titles. They are tried in order and the first match wins, so the specific ones belong above the general ones.^[unverified]

• A name: line names the pattern under it. Names change nothing about matching — they are there so the list can be reviewed. tools/podcast-parsers.py reports how many episodes each named format caught, which is how you tell a format the show really uses from a one-off somebody bolted on to catch a single straggler.^[unverified]
• A line starting with skip: marks episodes that have no guest — a backing track, a monologue, a festival announcement. Skipping them is not the same as failing to parse them, and keeping the two apart is what makes the unmatched list worth reading.^[unverified]
• A line starting with # is a comment.^[unverified]
• Anything else is a Python regular expression with a named group (?P<guest>...) around the part to capture.^[unverified]

Edit these freely. A pattern that does not compile is skipped and logged rather than breaking the feed, so a mistake here costs one show's guest names until somebody fixes it — never the feed itself.^[unverified]

This show has more skip rules than any other, because most of what it publishes is backing tracks and short briefings rather than interviews. Those episodes genuinely have no guest, which is a different thing from a title nobody has written a pattern for yet.^[unverified]

A note on how this list got shorter

It had forty-one patterns and now has sixteen. Seven of the old ones matched nothing at all, and thirteen matched exactly one episode each — one-offs added to rescue a single straggler, which is how a pattern list stops being reviewable. Worse, the broad catch-alls that accumulated at the bottom (capitalised words followed by anything) were matching titles that are not people at all.^[unverified]

Measured against all 538 episodes in the feed, the short list parses 145 where the long one parsed 146, skips exactly the same 379, and fixes two names it had been getting wrong: Roots Revival was being recorded as though it were a person, and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes was being truncated to "Bronwyn Keith".^[unverified]

The two episodes no longer parsed are a 500th-episode highlight reel listing nine musicians, and one celebration episode. Both are genuinely one-of-a-kind titles. If either matters, the answer is a pattern for a format the show uses, not a rule for that one title.^[unverified]

# Skips first: this show publishes far more practice material than interviews,
# and none of it has a guest. Skipping is not the same as failing to parse, and
# keeping them apart is what makes the unmatched list worth reading.

name: Jam-along practice tracks
skip:^.+\((?:[A-G][#b]? )?\d+ ?bpm\)

name: Jam-along tracks at several tempos
skip:^.+ (?:in [A-G][#b]? )?at \d+ tempos?\b

name: Mini jams
skip:^Mini Jam #

name: Bluegrass Briefing, the news round-up
skip:^Bluegrass Briefing

name: Food For Thought, the host's essays
skip:^Food [Ff]or Thought

name: Bitesize, short single-topic episodes
skip:^Bitesize[ ]

name: Housekeeping and announcements
skip:^(?:Intro to Bluegrass|Announcing[ ]|Inspiration for Musicians|A quick (?:update|August)|We reached \d+|IBMA (?:World of Bluegrass )?\d+ [Ss]pecial)

# The formats this show actually uses. Tried in order, first match wins, so the
# specific ones sit above the general ones.

name: Tribute episode, guest after the dash
^.+ [Tt]ribute part \d+ [-–] (?:featuring )?(?P<guest>.+)$

name: An occasion, guest named after "with"
^(?:Celebrating|Highlights from|Musicality|Roots Revival|Tonewoods Special|\d{4} Retrospective|.+ Anniversary Celebration).*? with (?P<guest>.+?)(?: \([^)]+\))?$

name: A multi-part series, guest named last
^Celebrating .+ [-–] part \d+ (?P<guest>.+)$

name: Guest interview
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)*(?: (?:and|&) [A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)*)?)(?: \([^)]+\))? (?:mini |extended )?[Ii]nterview.*$

name: Guest on a subject
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)+)(?: \([^)]+\))? on .+$

name: Guest does something
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)+) (?i:celebrates?|talks?|discusses|shares?|returns?|remembers?|has dinner)\b.*$

name: Guest's own thing
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)+)'s .+$

name: Guest and subject, separated by a dash
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)+)\s*[-–]\s*.+$

name: Guest with their band in brackets
^(?P<guest>[A-Z][\w.'\-]+(?: [A-Z]\.?)?(?: [A-Z][\w'\-]+)+) \([^)]+\)$

^[unverified]Proposed by Magent