BONUS TRACKS: Disney’s (Alt)Country Bear Jamboree Reopens With Familiar Voices

In case you haven’t been staying on top of your Disney news, the Country Bear Jamboree audio-animatronic show at Disney World has been shuttered for most of the year for a makeover. Why am I telling you this? Because the bears are now voiced by some familiar folks to roots music fans. Singer-songwriter Mac McAnally was the producer and arranger for the updated songs in the show, which mostly pull from popular Disney and Pixar movies, though there are a couple of originals. In addition to McAnally’s signature deep vocals for Terrence, the bears are voiced by Allison Russell (Teddi Barra), Chris Thile (Wendell, who’s always been a mandolin player, after all), and up-and-coming country singer Emily Ann Roberts (Trixie St. Claire). The Country Bear Jamboree runs continuously in Frontierland, in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Learn more about the updated show (including the set list!) in this story from Variety.

If your question is not “Who the fuck is Sturgill Simpson?” but “Where the fuck was Sturgill Simpson?”, a new interview in GQ with the enigmatic musician will clue you in. Simpson, of course, returned to our ears last Friday with a new album, Passage du Desir, under the name Johnny Blue Skies (ND review). But it was a long three years since his last album, The Ballad of Dood & Juanita (ND review), made extra fraught because of a vocal injury during the 2021 Outlaw Tour. Turns out, beset with depression and despair over whether he’d ever be able to sing again, Simpson headed to Thailand, then Paris, riding scooters, walking with ghosts, and making friends with locals who dubbed him “le cowboy.” Learn more about Simpson’s last three years and his artistic transition to Johnny Blue Skies here.

This week we lost two artists who firmly believed music could change the world. Happy Traum was a musician in the Greenwich Village folk scene and a frequent collaborator with Bob Dylan. But he had an even bigger impact via his Homespun Tapes company, which offered instructional books and videos for people wanting to learn how to play acoustic instruments. A disciple of Pete Seeger’s activism and Brownie McGhee’s blues guitar, Traum died of cancer, his friend and fellow musician John Sebastian told Rolling Stone. Read more about Happy Traum, Homespun Tapes, and more in this remembrance from Rolling Stone.

On Tuesday we lost Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist and co-founder of the Freedom Singers who used music to move people. In the 1960s she led songs in marches and was sometimes jailed for it. It only strengthened her resolve to lift her voice in order to lift people. Read more about The Freedom Singers and Reagon’s work in this story from our Summer 2021 journal, excerpted this week online to honor Reagon. In the late 1960s, Reagon founded women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and for her musical work and scholarship she won a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1989. Learn more about Reagon’s work in this remembrance from NPR.

WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO

Here’s a sampling of the songs, albums, bands, and sounds No Depression staffers have been into this week:

Mindy Smith – “Quiet Town,” the title track from her new album, coming in October
Jobi Riccio – “Instead”
Rainbow Girls – “You Must Not Feel the Way I Do,” from their new album, Haunting, coming in October
Phish Tiny Desk Concert
Bob Sumner – “Motel Room”
Larkin Poe – “Bluephoria”

Katie Mae & the Lubrication – “Yellow Medicine Hills”
Grace Pettis – “Rain”
Las Nubes – Tormentas Malsanas
Namian Sidibé – Namian Sidibé
Dan Tyminski – “Whiskey Drinking Man,” from his new album, Live From the Ryman, coming in August
Skip James – Today!
Hataałii – “Brown Fool Eyes,” from his new album, Waiting for a Sign, coming in September