LISA LAMBERT

I just met her a few weeks ago out at the Sparks Family Music Park in Dennis, where she and the Pine Ridge Boys were performing for the Music Box Project about women in roots music.

She has a special Fourth of July song to share, and it's terrific, so I thought I'd share it here.

Read more: NEMS360.com
- Scene Now Blog - NEMS360.COM

I just met her a few weeks ago out at the Sparks Family Music Park in Dennis, where she and the Pine Ridge Boys were performing for the Music Box Project about women in roots music.

She has a special Fourth of July song to share, and it's terrific, so I thought I'd share it here.

Read more: NEMS360.com
- Scene Now Blog - NEMS360.COM

Dyann and Rick Arthur are traveling the country in search of a rare species: female instrumentalists.
That journey has brought the Arthurs to the Sparks Family Music Park in Dennis, outside Belmont, where they're listening and talking to Lisa Lambert.
Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys pick and sing, playing a mix of old-time gospel tunes, bluegrass standards and Lambert-penned songs so fresh the ink hasn't dried on them yet. All the while, Dyann and Rick pick and sing along, tap their toes and record everything they can.

Read more: NEMS360.com - Filmmakers stop in Belmont on journey to document women in roots music
- North Mississippi Daily Journal

Dyann and Rick Arthur are traveling the country in search of a rare species: female instrumentalists.
That journey has brought the Arthurs to the Sparks Family Music Park in Dennis, outside Belmont, where they're listening and talking to Lisa Lambert.
Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys pick and sing, playing a mix of old-time gospel tunes, bluegrass standards and Lambert-penned songs so fresh the ink hasn't dried on them yet. All the while, Dyann and Rick pick and sing along, tap their toes and record everything they can.

Read more: NEMS360.com - Filmmakers stop in Belmont on journey to document women in roots music
- North Mississippi Daily Journal

Back in the day, The Pine Ridge Boys were at the cutting edge of modern technology. It was the 1950s, when channel 9 in Tupelo ran a contest, and the Pine Ridge Boys won a television show...Flash forward more than 60 years, and you'll find The Pine Ridge Boys once again at the forefront of technology. Now known as Lisa Lambert and The Pine Ridge Boys, the group is on Twitter, Facebook and youtube.com and downloads are available at Amazon, Rhapsody and Jango....(read entire article at link below) - North Mississippi Daily Journal

Back in the day, The Pine Ridge Boys were at the cutting edge of modern technology. It was the 1950s, when channel 9 in Tupelo ran a contest, and the Pine Ridge Boys won a television show...Flash forward more than 60 years, and you'll find The Pine Ridge Boys once again at the forefront of technology. Now known as Lisa Lambert and The Pine Ridge Boys, the group is on Twitter, Facebook and youtube.com and downloads are available at Amazon, Rhapsody and Jango....(read entire article at link below) - North Mississippi Daily Journal

Lisa Lambert & Scott Nunley are members of The Mississippi Alliance for Arts Education, and have been performing for years as a duo and with several bands such as bluegrass gospel performers, The Sparks Family Singers Both Lisa and Scott play a variety of instruments and sing, but Lisa especially brings authenticity and a truckload of soul to her countrified vocals. At the 2007 Waterway Festival in Burnsville, MS, Lisa asked a couple of the venerable Pine Ridge Boys to accompany her onstage and before long the entire band began performing live and on CDs with Lisa and Scott.

From 1949-1959, The Pine Ridge Boys were a Mid-South sensation. In early 2007, the surviving members of the original band resurrected The Pine Ridge Boys & added some new blood. They burst back on the music scene with two successful CD's ("Precious Memories" and "The Pine Ridge Boys 2nd Album"). Lisa Lambert & The Pine Ridge Boys tailor their music to their audience but their shows generally include a mixture of gospel and secular bluegrass music sprinkled with a touch of jazz, some old time country music and what they call "hillbilly blues." Not content with playing the same old tunes the same old way, the band adds new twists to forgotten classics delighting old fans while creating a generation of new ones. - Center For Southern Folklore - Memphis, TN

LAMBERT TO PERFORM BLUEGRASS ON FRIDAY...

One of your best bests for entertainment this week will be in Iuka MS this weekend.

LISA LAMBERT AND THE PINE RIDGE BOYS will perform a bluegrass blend of music at "Bluegrass At The VFW" - THE DAILY JOURNAL

LAMBERT TO PERFORM BLUEGRASS ON FRIDAY...

One of your best bests for entertainment this week will be in Iuka MS this weekend.

LISA LAMBERT AND THE PINE RIDGE BOYS will perform a bluegrass blend of music at "Bluegrass At The VFW" - THE DAILY JOURNAL

It was a bitterly cold night, but it was a night of good, old-time gospel and bluegrass music at the VFW/American Legion post in Iuka on Friday night, Jan. 16. Lisa Lambert and The Pine Ridge Boys were the visiting band and they played to a large and appreciative crowd.
The venerable Brian Sparks and Nolan Wells of Belmont are the only two members of the original Pine Ridge Boys formed in the early '50s, who still play regularly with the band. Brian still has his high tenor voice and you can hear it come through forcefully on some of their songs.
This band spends time in practice and it shows! Lynn Grissom's banjo and Nolan Wells' dobro guitar blend well with the vocals of Scott Nunley, Curley Ward, Lisa Lambert and Brian Sparks. Grissom hails from Red Bay, AL.
Wells goes solo on "The Way I Am," a Merle Haggard song from the past, and he handles it well. Bobby Dennis provided bass support and sang one song: "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine." Possible the best received song judging by the crowd reaction was Scott Nunley's singing of "Good Morning Neighbor"!.... - Daily Corinthian

It was a bitterly cold night, but it was a night of good, old-time gospel and bluegrass music at the VFW/American Legion post in Iuka on Friday night, Jan. 16. Lisa Lambert and The Pine Ridge Boys were the visiting band and they played to a large and appreciative crowd.
The venerable Brian Sparks and Nolan Wells of Belmont are the only two members of the original Pine Ridge Boys formed in the early '50s, who still play regularly with the band. Brian still has his high tenor voice and you can hear it come through forcefully on some of their songs.
This band spends time in practice and it shows! Lynn Grissom's banjo and Nolan Wells' dobro guitar blend well with the vocals of Scott Nunley, Curley Ward, Lisa Lambert and Brian Sparks. Grissom hails from Red Bay, AL.
Wells goes solo on "The Way I Am," a Merle Haggard song from the past, and he handles it well. Bobby Dennis provided bass support and sang one song: "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine." Possible the best received song judging by the crowd reaction was Scott Nunley's singing of "Good Morning Neighbor"!.... - Daily Corinthian

June 9, 2009
"...Next hillbilly folk band Lisa Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys took us back to the Elvis days with some incredible instrumentals and wonderful vocal harmony. Dressed in their matching attire, they really represented the hills country blues genre with class and talent." - www.tupelojoe.com

June 9, 2009
"...Next hillbilly folk band Lisa Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys took us back to the Elvis days with some incredible instrumentals and wonderful vocal harmony. Dressed in their matching attire, they really represented the hills country blues genre with class and talent." - www.tupelojoe.com

I arrived back in Burnsville to catch more of the Waterway Festival, and specifically the performance of Lisa Lambert & The Pine Ridge Boys. They took the stage in the bright sun light, no canopy for shade, just after 2 pm.
Their music was good; especially those numbers where Lisa Lambert teamed with Scott Nunley for harmony. The Pine Ridge Boys are a band from the 1950's, but they can still play good blugrass and country music! This was the biggest crowd of people I have seen attend the Waterway Festival in all its history. - Daily Corinthian

By Mark Jordan
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

When one thinks of Mississippi music, the blues inevitably come to mind first. But the Magnolia State has a rich tradition in a variety of genres, including country music.

“People think of the blues, but you know Jimmie Rodgers was from Mississippi,” says Lisa Lambert of Dennis, Miss., a country musician and longtime blues fan who discovered how closely related the two were when she joined up with the old-time country outfit the Pine Ridge Boys three years ago. “As we were learning these old songs, I’d recognize it as a blues song. They don’t recognize it when I call out a blues song, but we both know the lyrics. There’re so many songs that have crossed genres through the years.”


Pine Ridge Boys

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Saturday, Lambert and the Pine Ridge Boys will bring their take on Mississippi country music to the Center For Southern Folklore.

The Pine Ridge Boys are something of a Mississippi country music institution. The group’s origins reach back to the late 1940s when high school friends Bryan Sparks and Buford Wells formed a hillbilly band in Belmont in Tishomingo Country, Miss., near the Alabama state line. In 1949, that group became the Pine Ridge Boys and began barnstorming the Southeast.

In the mid 1950s, the band’s regional popularity led to its own live television show on a station in nearby Tupelo. Their show came on before that of bluegrass superstars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who, in the days before videotape, had to travel to six cities — including Tupelo — weekly to perform their syndicated program live.

“The big joke was that every time Flatt and Scruggs would come in the station, they’d have a couple of pieces of mail in their box and the Pine Ridge Boys’ mailbox would be full,” says Lambert. “Flatt and Scruggs would want to know who these guys were.”

Eventually they found out, and Flatt and Scruggs sponsor, flour and cornmeal maker Martha White, offered to put the Pine Ridge Boys on the road, too. But with several members of the group having just started families, the band opted to stay put. They also passed on an opportunity to audition for Memphis’ Sun Records.

“I kind of wish we’d done it,” says Sparks of the missed professional opportunities. “But then on the other hand, I wouldn’t give up my kids for anything.”

The Pine Ridge Boys’ television show went off the air in 1959, and the band broke up in the early ’60s after Wells became ill. Sparks continued to play music, eventually forming the gospel country outfit the Sparks Family Singers, which played around the tri-state region for more than three decades.

In 2005, Sparks recruited his nephew Scott Nunley and his wife Lambert into the latest incarnation of the Sparks Family Singers. For Lambert, who inherited her love of music from her grandmother growing up in Iuka, Miss., the group represented a return to music-making.

“I just loved music and think I wanted to please my grandmother more than anything else,” recalls Lambert. “Music was real important to my grandmother. But she had eight children and 57 grandchildren, and none of them played a musical instrument except for me.”

Adept on piano, guitar, fiddle, and vocals, Lambert played for a while in a group called the Good Ole Boys, made up mostly of her father’s friends, including the son of Grand Ole Opry member and former Bill Monroe guitarist Pete Pyle. But Lambert had largely set music aside to focus on her and Nunley’s insurance business when Sparks asked them to join the family band.

Two years later, following the death of Wells, the Pine Ridge Boys reunited and eventually drew Lambert and Nunley into its ranks. Today the Pine Ridge Boys consists of original members Sparks and Buford’s brother Nolan on Dobro along with newer “Boys” Nunley on guitar, Lambert on guitar and fiddle, Curly Ward on guitar, Lynn Grissom on banjo, and Bobby Dennis on bass.

“I joke that they’re the world’s oldest teenagers,” says Lambert of her bandmates, whom she describes as cutups. “Bryan is 80, we have three 70 year-olds, two of whom will be 71 in just a couple of months; two 60-year-olds, and me. And I’m not going to tell you how old I am, or I’d have to kill you.”

In its second incarnation, the Pine Ridge Boys have been almost as busy as they were in their salad days a half century ago. The band has recorded two albums, Gospel Songs From the Mississippi Hills (2008) and Blues Songs From the Mississippi Hills (2009). They also have two more — a gospel and a secular disc, both of which feature vintage recordings from the original Pine Ridge Boys alongside new material from the current lineup — in the works. Lambert says the discs should be ready in the coming - commercialappeal.com www.gomemphis.com

A modern-day verson of "Tishomingo Blues" has been recorded as a single by Lisa Lambert of Dennis, MS (only 12 miles away from the namesake town). The cd is noteworthy and captures the sounds one associates with jazz and blues music of the 20's era. - Daily Corinthian

A modern-day verson of "Tishomingo Blues" has been recorded as a single by Lisa Lambert of Dennis, MS (only 12 miles away from the namesake town). The cd is noteworthy and captures the sounds one associates with jazz and blues music of the 20's era. - Daily Corinthian