Jazz violinist and bassist Johnny Frigo spent most of his career in Chicago but crossed many musical boundaries along the way. One of the last survivors of the early generation of jazz violinists that included Stephane Grappelli, Stuff Smith and […]
Though the Steep Canyon Rangers earned the coveted IBMA Emerging Artist of the Year award in September 2006, the fact is that they’d been emerging — albeit very slowly — for nearly a decade. Banjo player Graham Sharp met Woody […]
Glance around the website of the group United Steel Workers of Montreal and you’ll find a “dead members” page devoted to mock missing-kid milk cartons, each container adorned with the name of a departed band member. Fourteen names are listed […]
“Mary Oliver, a poet I’m fond of, talks about writing for twenty years before she ever was published as a choice,” says Wes Doggett, a.k.a. Willem Maker, by way of explaining the circuitous route that led to his recent solo […]
Vivian Liberto was married to Johnny Cash for the first dozen years of his musical career, but it is his side of their epistolary courtship — Cash in Germany doing his hitch in the Air Force, Liberto in San Antonio, […]
Oral histories have one advantage: because they aren’t at the mercy of a biographer’s filters and interpretations, they reveal the personality behind the narrator, flaws and all, to give the stories warmth and depth. We become charmed, from bad grammar […]
Having placed 79 singles in the Billboard country Top-40 (including five #1s) from 1953-1979, Faron Young ended his days in December 1996, alone in a modest ranch home on the outskirts of Nashville. On St. Patrick’s Day 1970, he gave […]
Steve Goodman was a study in contrasts. At 5 feet 2 inches, he stood tall among those who knew him as a man and a musician. While his life was cut short by leukemia in 1984 at age 36, Goodman […]
Good photographers, when fully immersed in a place where life is happening, write both history and fancy with their lenses. Sandra L. Dyas, whose work periodically appears in these pages, is more than a good photographer, and has spent more […]
Stacie Collins’ life would make a good country song. She’s been a stunt double, model, actress, ballroom dance instructor, courier, flower arranger, and caterer. She’s an actual Okie from Muskogee whose father was a musician. Her parents split when she […]
