Before Duncan McLean won the Somerset Maugham Award (for a book of short stories), all he wanted to do was sit on his “arse and think about Bob Wills.” Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), one of the stipulations […]
Turning down Pearl Street into the Southern gothic neighborhood of Cabbagetown near downtown Atlanta, Amy Pike belts out her take on Big Joe Turner’s “Love Roller Coaster” over the car stereo: “I’ve got atomic power,” she croons, “Going a thousand […]
In a 1986 article about Delta blues singer Robert Johnson, Greil Marcus observed that blues was music born not of enslavement, but of liberation. “For the first time,” he wrote, “[blacks] were acting like free people, and running into the […]
For Marques Bovre & the Evil Twins, there are two sides to every coin. Bovre grew up in the tiny Sugar River village of Paoli, Wisconsin, but he remembers taking the 8 a.m. Badger Bus into Madison most weekends, finding […]
Martin Zellar used to be the lead singer of the Gear Daddies, a Minneapolis-based garage band of rare vision and grace that released two albums in the late ’80s. The band’s emotional live shows — great rambling sets filled with […]
The Steam Donkeys are either psychic or just plain lucky. The Buffalo, New York. band called their first CD, released in 1994, Cosmic Americana, not realizing that soon afterward there would be a new radio format recognized by the trade […]
A commanding singer with a broad, expressive range, a deep knowledge of country idioms and some 30 years of experience in the music business, Suzanne Thomas remains largely unknown. In large part this is because she’s spent the past decade […]
I suppose there was a time, way back before I can remember, when I was not aware of Tammy Wynette — but I imagine I soaked up her presence before I knew I was doing it. I didn’t have any […]
If alternative country — whatever it may be — is to reach a fundamental level of public awareness, much of it will depend on the efforts of those who seek to provide it with a respectable place in the cultural […]
Those who know Linda McRae from her eight-year tenure with Canada’s Spirit Of The West may be in for a bit of a surprise from her solo debut, Flying Jenny. Where Spirit took her from Celtic music to rock to […]
