“Doing this sort of music was an idea,” Cyndi Wheeler explains, at a java emporium not far from Music Row. “I’ve come to love bluegrass so much; it speaks to me on a whole different level than jazz does, but […]
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It’s a long, sometimes treacherous, often exhilarating road from Federal Way, just south of Seattle, to the tiny, century-old spa village of Soap Lake, Washington. Winding first through picture-book peaks and spectacular, open passes, then over fog-filled crevasses and past […]
What About Bob? I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming, but in the weeks leading up to the tabulation of our fourth annual No Depression critics’ poll, I wondered whether our top vote-getter this year might be Rosanne […]
“Church of human connection”: A Hallelujah chorus “Hallelujah!” Greg Brown is right, that’s one of those rare, beautiful words. I’ve always associated hallelujah with Bono of U2, when I hear it being sung — whether it is in the song […]
Occasionally my wife Lisa helps me update the logs I keep of all the music that arrives in the mail day after day, sometimes piling up until it’s hard to find a clear pathway to my desk. This weekend she […]
In the decades since it was broadcast in prime time, circa 1963-’64, the ABC commercial folk concert series “Hootenanny” has certainly been referred to often enough, in tones alternately nostalgic or mocking. Clearly, more people know that artists such as […]
LETTING PORTER BE PORTER: Extraordinary recording sessions were taking place just off Music Row in Nashville during the last week of November for a Marty Stuart-produced hard-core country Porter Wagoner album tentatively entitled Wagonmaster. It’s set for release on Anti- […]
Mexican-American singer and icon Freddy Fender’s humble beginnings belie the influence that he was to become. Born to poor migrant farm worker parents, Baldemar G. Huerta grew up in the fertile Rio Grande Valley of the Texas-Mexico border, in the […]
What a bizarre artifact this book is! We can start with the title. Has anyone out there ever seen the word “dance” spelled like that? And just what are Texas music’s “badlands”? The place where nothing grows? It gets weirder […]
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