“There’s been a lot of talk about political songs and songs that aren’t political,” Steve Earle said into the solitary microphone that he and his Bluegrass Dukes had gathered around on a sunny and breezy Saturday afternoon in Telluride. “But […]
The story of the twentysomething rocker who discovers traditional music (be it folk, country, old-time or bluegrass), becomes obsessed, and rarely looks back has become an archetype if not a cliche. But no young punk has undergone so thorough and […]
On the Sunday before the U.S. invaded Iraq last year, millions of people in cities across the planet gathered for protests, and, along with a friend and his 18-year-old son, I attended the one here in Berlin. We wandered through […]
Luck, Texas, isn’t as easy to find as it used to be. Development has sprawled the entire 25 miles from downtown Austin to this idyllic little spot in the Hill Country near Lake Travis where Willie Nelson created his own […]
Chances are that anyone reading this magazine was touched by the life and work of Sis Cunningham, who died on June 27 in a Brooklyn nursing home. I was: Broadside, the magazine she and her husband Gordon Friesen (who died […]
Music comes from everywhere, of course, but the logic of commerce argues that American popular music should mostly be produced in the industry’s three principal business centers: New York, Los Angeles and Nashville. And sometimes it is. But an ever-expanding […]
As the title promises, this 200-page collection of interviews with ten classic country stars resonates with voices. Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, Eddy Arnold: Folks such as these have been written about endlessly, but, outside of their music, usually speak to […]
The Bluegrass Reader is the latest volume in the vast Music in American Life series from the University of Illinois Press. Edited by Thomas Goldsmith — a journalist, producer and musician with ties to Hazel Dickens, David Olney and Uncle […]
Michael Dyson, author of this excellent work of “biocriticism,” teaches in the Humanities Department at Penn, is a Baptist preacher, and has written prior studies of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Tupac Shakur. In this examination of Marvin Gaye, […]
Books chronicling the making of a single album have become a kind of subgenre recently, some of them tending toward overwrought think-pieces or snorefests of minutiae. There have been some worthy entries though, and Michael Streissguth’s account of Johnny Cash […]
