Judging Old School Freight Train by their name is a bit hazardous. Clubs have booked them anticipating a hip-hop band; old-time music heads might expect a rough and roaring take on blues and fiddle tunes. Instead, this quintet comes on […]
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If you’re thinking of investing twenty bucks in this exhaustively detailed life story of the Byrds’ doomed singer, spend a few minutes in the bookstore reading the seven-page introduction. It’ll give you a perfect idea of what the next 325 […]
On the one hand, Jeffrey Lange, a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, has written “a very good summation of country music’s history during the crucial years from 1939 to 1954” (as scholar Bill C. […]
What a maddening, teeth-gnashing, discouraging thing this book is, no matter how grateful readers will be to editors Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov for its exhumation. The story behind — and of — Lost Delta Found would make a rich […]
Late December 1953, Johnnie Johnson’s saxophone player is sick and can’t make the biggest money gig of the year: New Year’s Eve at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis. Johnson knows this kid, Chuck Berry, heard him play in […]
Many sidemen of Jerry Byrd’s generation are forgotten to all but aging fans, fellow musicians and historians, all of whom duly noted the steel guitarist’s April 11 death of Parkinson’s Disease at age 85. In Byrd’s adopted home state of […]
Growing up an Arizona girl, I once asked my musician father why American music always seemed to be changing while all kinds of Latin music stayed essentially the same. The answer was some windy thesis on the evolution of western […]
Let’s get it out of the way: Johnathan Rice sounds like Conor Oberst. He can’t help it. He likes Conor Oberst. Conor Oberst is a friend. Oberst’s band Bright Eyes, along with countless other Saddle Creek acts, was a big […]
Megan Hickey is poised. Poised for success, yes, maybe — American and European distribution deals are coming together, and she recently opened for a sold-out Jayhawks show — but even without all that, she’s poised. Onstage or at home in […]
When Sufjan Stevens was growing up in Michigan, there wasn’t much music in his everyday life. His stepfather had a decent record collection, but Stevens spent most of the year with his biological dad, whose sole foray into the field […]
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