Nashville has long been a printing center (witness the still vital Hatch Show Print), but not an advertising (nor a design) crucible. For record labels, that means that unlike New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago the pool of designers, illustrators, […]
The cover of Rod Picott’s latest CD, Stray Dogs, says a lot about him. He’s gazing downward in a pose that’s both humble and melancholy; in his hand is an old fedora that connects him to a class of people […]
If looks could kill, the cover shot of Rosanne Cash’s 1985 album Rhythm & Romance would have landed her on somebody’s most wanted list. Staring hard into the camera, a country-rock femme fatale in boudoir white, she dared you to […]
Watching Tim Easton perform solo acoustic at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum in January was like watching a top baseball pitching prospect finally hurl the game everyone knew he could. Easton has long offered considerable talent, but past appearances in Los […]
August 1987. I first moved to St. Louis, after a protracted exile in Utah. I had grown up in the midwest; St. Louis was a new town to me but still felt like home. I was living on a college […]
Siblings Brian and Hugh DeNeal, who lead the raunchy, take-no-prisoners ensemble known as the Woodbox Gang, grew up in the Shawnee hollows in southern Illinois, a remote delta region bordered by the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and blanketed by forests, […]
David Eugene Edwards has children to support, and a wife, so he turned the songs that had been floating around in his head into a solo project called Woven Hand. The members of 16 Horsepower, the band that had, if […]
This 927-page tome is easily the most important research aid for the study of country music undertaken in our time. Along with Tony Russell’s discographic investigation of pre-World War II country music (scheduled for publication early next year by Oxford […]
Jim McReynolds, the guitar-playing half of Grand Ole Opry and IBMA Hall of Honor members Jim & Jesse, died of cancer in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 31, 2002. He was 75 years old. With his passing, country music’s longest active […]
It’s late night in a dingy Manhattan hotel and, as Swedish musicians will do, Nicolai Dunger has fallen asleep while waiting for Soundtrack Of Our Lives to return from a Rolling Stones concert. Dunger has dim blue eyes — tinged […]
