January 1999

In a photo on the CD jacket, flames appear to lap at an upright bass that’s autographed by Willie Dixon. It’s ex-Bottle Rocket Tom Ray’s bass, and he learned from Willie how to slap it — to keep time like […]

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If you can see through the hangover haze and black-eyed pea tradition that ties one First Day to another, January 1st can serve as a dog-eared page for the book of days that follow. But on New Year’s Day 1997, […]

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J.D. Sumner — who died November 16, just three days shy of his 74th birthday — was a giant of Southern gospel music, and not just because he stood an imposing 6’5″ or because his bass singing voice was so […]

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In a chocolate fedora, blue pinstriped suit and black spit-shined shoes, Tom Roznowski looks like he just stepped out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. “My dad used to say I was born a half-century early,” the forty-ish Roznowski says, tipping […]

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In what was to be the last year of his life, in conversation with erstwhile crony Red West, Elvis Presley asked the Biblical question, “What profiteth a man if he gains the world and loses his own soul?” On the […]

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John Miller, singer-songwriter for Glasgow’s Radio Sweethearts, is well aware that the idea of a Scottish band playing traditional country music is apt to raise a few eyebrows Stateside. Nonetheless, Miller can trace his as well as his country’s enduring […]

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“People think that if you’re from the South you’re a dumbass or a hick,” says Lou Ford’s vocalist/guitarist, Alan Edwards. Like the band’s namesake, the evil Barney Fife-like character from Jim Thompson’s book The Killer Inside Me, the members of […]

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Joe Henry once called The Last Waltz “the perfect fall album.” Big Johns, the November release from rustic Chapel Hill outfit Jennyanykind, also somehow manages to sound and feel like autumn, evoking that strange combination of cool, bracing air and […]

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J.D. Crowe is old enough to remember when bluegrass was the new thing. He says he knew he wanted to be a bluegrass musician the very first time he heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo on the Kentucky Barn Dance […]

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