1999

1 Tom Waits, Mule Variations (Epitaph) 2 Old 97’s, Fight Songs (Elektra) 3 Wilco, Summer Teeth (Reprise) 4 Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (Mercury) 5 Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band, The Mountain (E-Squared) 6 Tom […]

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Many college towns seem to have a bar called the Library. The theory is that students in search of more than just a study hall could tell their parents, “Oh, I spent the night at the library,” when in fact […]

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Twisted with such subtlety you’re taken in before you know it, Andrew Bird’s Bowl Of Fire, and their latest disc, Oh! The Grandeur, are too original to be so accessible, too arcane to be so catchy, too smart to be […]

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At the first, it must have seemed she hardly existed outside the arms of the energetic and surprisingly determined relatives everywhere around her. For a long time Anita Carter did not know that she’d been born (in March 1933) into […]

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It’s Sunday afternoon during the final hours of the five-day Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Bob Childers has spent the better part of the week holding court with everyone from journalists to polite town folks, […]

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In a perfect imaginary world, six musicians of a roots/pop collective all live, eat, sleep and breathe together. In the same bucolic setting — maybe a big, woodsy house with a fireplace that always burns — do they rise and […]

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Danielle Howle is a staunchly independent free spirit who has done things her own way for years. She began performing in South Carolina over a decade ago with an acoustic group that got “mostly weird looks from the local bar’s […]

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Just like St. Paul, David Ball had his life changed by a sudden revelation. Ball, though, wasn’t riding a donkey on the road to Damascus when the epiphany arrived. He was driving his car through South Carolina. “I was at […]

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