Marah’s fans are not multitudinous yet, but the fans this Philadelphia group does have include some of the most respected figures in roots-rock. When Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt of Blue Mountain, for example, heard a tape of Marah’s first […]
It’s a Sunday night Halloween in New York. The ritual candles are blown out, our black cats are left home to their own devices, most of the costumed weirdos on the Lower East Side have been parading their babies or […]
Word has been reaching us from Austin for quite a while now about a young honky-tonker who writes terrific songs and has an impressive debut record (Hillbilly Heights, which came out in August on Texas Round-Up Records). With the number […]
The sub-genre might be called Americana, but would it exist without Canadians? Not as we know it anyway — consider the contributions of Great White Northerners Neil Young and (most of) The Band. Maybe it should be “North Americana.” Fans […]
It was exactly the sort of scene Doug Sahm would have immediately jumped into the middle of and made his own: a tornadic after-hours jam fearlessly mixing Tex-Mex, blues, country, rock, jazz and R&B in front of an audience willing […]
The last seconds of the last song of the first of the last two shows for a long time: the singer and writer turned toward his Vox amp and ground away at his strings, holding the notes, though the drummer […]
So there I am, slumping in my favorite chair on the back porch of my Tucson digs, when into my peripheral window slithers a large black-and-yellow-banded bull snake. Suddenly I am on full alert, for despite the fact that bull […]
It figures that Tift Merritt is a native Texan. Oh sure, Merritt spent the better part of her formative years in North Carolina, and still lives there. But Houston is where she was actually born in 1975, and where the […]
Songwriters being mistaken for the people they sing about is an occupational hazard. In Phil Lee’s case, the “hazard” part is not an abstraction — thanks to songs such as “I’m The Why She’s Gone”, in which the first-person narrator […]
Like its namesake, the old west sidearm, the Peacemakers’ music minds that geometric line beyond which the romance of risk and chance yields to the ruin of just one step across. Lead Peacemaker Roger Clyne is a storyteller, and his […]
