Performers billed by a single name are often over-the-top: Madonna, Cher, Liberace. But not Thao. The Virginia-bred songwriter isn’t the sort to swoop out from the wings with a crystal chandelier on her head. Nor does she clutter up songs […]
In Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s classic road chronicle, the author “took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.” As it turns out, the band […]
She may be mythic to some, but Anna Lee Amsden also makes a tasty fried cornbread. She is serving it to hungry music fans in Woodstock, N.Y., one late Saturday night in early September as Levon Helm, her friend of […]
PONDEROSA PARADISE: Admit it — Getting worked up for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2008 isn’t quite so easy when headliners include Billy Joel and Tim McGraw. But there is still a mighty fine reason to make tracks […]
Critics’ & readers’ polls: On the banks of sweet Dundee After years of searching around for the latest issue, my daughters gave me a subscription to No Depression for Christmas. The new issue arrived (very promptly, well done). Upon reading […]
Dear Friends: Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish. It is difficult even to type those words, so please know that we have not come lightly to […]
The Cowboy Junkies invited such friends as Vic Chesnutt, Natalie Merchant and Ryan Adams to Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity to help them revisit the music of an album that was seminal for so many, and which is, holy […]
Kenneth Francis Nelson, who died January 6 at his home in Somis, California, at 96, was an enabler in the best sense of the word. In 26 years overseeing Capitol Records’ country division, his primary goal beyond selling records was […]
It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate just to strike “Industry” from this book’s subtitle. That’s because Diane Pecknold’s The Selling Sound argues that “the rise of country music” and “the rise of the country music industry” are, if not identical phenomena, […]
J.D. “CAST” KING, whose 2005 country album Saw Mill Man won substantial acclaim, died December 13 in Old Sand Mountain, Alabama. He was 81.
