It’s hard to believe that Chet Atkins, a name synonymous with Nashville, ever had a problem with the place, but in 1950 he did. He was in Springfield, Missouri, at the time, working on KWTO with Maybelle and the Carter […]
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There’s a guy in an office on Music Row, the kind of office you can find all over Nashville — album covers and promotional posters on the walls, a conference table with enough room for artists and managers and label […]
At the business end of commercial country music, Australia’s not really that different from the United States. There are the same silicon trappings: big hair, white hats, insipid power ballads, soft-focus video clips. The only difference is the occasional reference […]
“All children make up stories, most folks just quit,” David Clark says when asked how he got started. Clark’s storytelling carries a definite musicality in texture, tone, and pace, peeling open layers of meaning behind the simple actions of everyday […]
Elbert West is “livin’ the life.” Sure, that’s the name of his new album on Broken Bow Records, but more importantly, it’s the state of mind he lives by. “It’s Friday night for me every night,” West says. “It’s Christmas […]
Shortly after the lunch rush ends, Gillian Welch comes to breakfast, leaving David Rawlings home to sleep off the long drive from New York. She enters dripping wet — it is, briefly, monsoon season — and smiling. Nobody gives her […]
“It’s not an insult to have a past, and to have some accountability to it,” says Grant-Lee Phillips, former frontman of the late and occasionally great Grant Lee Buffalo, and current solo artist. “From time to time I try to […]
Sarah Lee Guthrie still vividly remembers the epiphany that struck her three years ago in Los Angeles when her husband-to-be, Johnny Irion, handed her a guitar and guided her through that first simple lesson. “I was trying to play a […]
Joe Flood literally wears his influences on the sleeve of his Diesel Only debut, Cripplin’ Crutch. Strumming an acoustic guitar at an old upright piano, he’s framed by a trio of album covers. Lead Belly is flanked by Johnny Cash, […]
In 1997, an independent film titled The Planet Of Junior Brown highlighted the Toronto International Film Festival. When I stumbled across that title during a web search for a certain alterna-country artist, I was struck by what an inspired idea […]
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