January Jay Traynor, vocalist (Jay & The Americans) Phil Everly, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Saul Zaentz, record company and film executive Reather Dixon Turner, vocalist (The Bobbettes) Dave Madden, actor and manager (Partridge Family) Steven Fromholz, vocalist and songwriter Pete […]
Dressed in a faded denim jacket, shirt, jeans, and beat-up brown cowboy hat, Billy Joe Shaver strode onstage and unceremoniously dropped his jacket and plastic bottle of water in front of a monitor, waved to the crowd and launched into […]
Nashville singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters’ new album Blackbirds is out early in the year, but I am not going to review it as a whole. Suffice it to say that it is good and that parts of it were redolent of Leonard […]
Time for the third annual look back on the best music experiences I had over the past year. They are not in any “best” order: – Meeting Jimmy Page. It was not just that he is a true guitar god, a name-brand […]
The term “improvisation” is quite ubiquitous in jazz music. It stands for creating melodies over chord changes of a tune. The improvisation may or may not depend on the structure of the original tune. This article is not meant for […]
He was just one bigamous marriage to his 13-year-old cousin (and a trip to England) away from eclipsing Elvis, and Rick Bragg’s book, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story tells the tale from Jerry Lee’s perspective. In the summer of 1957, Lewis […]
‘Twixtmas” — the days between Christmas and New Year — are often filled with activities such as devising new recipes for using up left over turkey, going for long winter walks, watching old films on TV, shopping in the sales, playing […]
The roses have faded, there’s frost at my door The birds in the morning don’t sing anymore The grass in the valley is starting to die And out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry. — Hank Williams, […]
The Wild Feathers rolled into the 9:30 Club with a full head of steam, the next-to-last stop on their 2014 work-a-holic tour. Showing no signs of burn-out from relentless touring, the boys exuded a cocksure confidence and took the full-house […]
Critics, by nature, overanalyze. After all, it’s our job to not only figure out whether music works, but to turn the average listener’s ears in a direction that’ll help them hear things they may not have heard in a casual […]
