In theory, musical tradition would seem to be a pretty straightforward proposition: A style is handed down from one generation to the next as young musicians serve apprenticeships, learn the history and characteristics of a style, and then go on […]
With extended music videos culled from TV origins, we get mainly (even on DVD) concert films and maybe a little bio, or documentaries with “selected” cut-up performances. Results vary as the usual imitations are overcome. Ryan Adams Live in Jamaica […]
Well, you got this far, so that’s encouraging. You will be wondering about the remarkable figure who adorns our cover, then. Hopefully you will not have jumped to the conclusion that Little Miss Cornshucks is a joke, some kind of […]
Stuck inside of Spokane: With the political blues again Recently I was stuck in the Spokane airport when my plane did not go out, and so I had a lot of time on my hands to ponder why a No […]
1 Norah Jones, Come Away With Me (Blue Note) 2 Johnny Cash, American IV: The Man Comes Around (Lost Highway/American) 3 Beck, Sea Change (Geffen) 4 Kathleen Edwards, Failer (Zoe/Rounder) 5 Alison Krauss & Union Station, Live (Rounder) 6 Dixie […]
WAR ON WAR: Artists within the country and Americana music communities have expressed their views on the war in Iraq recently in a variety of ways, and have provoked a variety of reactions. Media attention has focused primarily on the […]
Saturday night, Sunday morning. It’s hard to have a conversation about country music with Dan Kershaw, lead singer and chief songwriter for Brothers Cosmoline, without that phrase cropping up — probably because country music so often draws its dramatic tension […]
Bill Carlisle — who died March 17 at age 94 — was born in Wakefield, Kentucky at the dawn of relativity theory, and the four-foot-high stage jumps that became his trademark also modified Newtonian physics. His hillbilly boogie leered louder […]
Almost everyone knows the song “Try A Little Tenderness.” Most remember it as the soul ballad nailed by Otis Redding in 1966 — based, he always said, on ideas heard in performances by Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin a […]
Eleni Mandell was in high school when she discovered that country music and run-ins with the law sometimes go hand-in-hand. “I was a huge X fan,” Mandell begins. “So when the Knitters happened, I went and saw them.” Although her […]
