Like a garrulous old friend who’s back in your life, full of tales to tell of life lived for better or worse, The Jayhawks, with all but one of the original members, returned after 15 years with a new record, […]
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There’s a warm welcome in the sound of acoustic guitars. Resonant, woody, and mellow like a fire in the grate after an autumn walk in the country, colored by the inflections of fingers and picks, strings and slides. So close […]
Fran Leadon and Leigh Anderson, authors, parents and mainstays of the Brooklyn bluegrass community, have embarked on a quixotic and lovely journey called The Carter Family Project that will result in home-made recordings of every song the Carter Family ever […]
When Tompkins Square released the first of its Charlie Louvin recordings, Smoke asked The Lomax Archive‘s Nathan Salsburg to visit with Charlie in Nashville. He came away with two video interviews and four original video performances of traditional murder ballads. […]
Though it produced a body of work kaleidoscopic in its variety and intersecting interests, the search for answers to deceptively simple questions drove Alan Lomax to wander America and eventually the world: “Why do people sing? Why do they dance?” […]
I once followed Metallica through a coliseum’s fluorescent underground maze to a pitch-black stage. When the lights ignited, the crowd unleashed a roar like the tailpipe of a fighter jet. The band responded with fusillades of drums and screaming guitars. […]
Though they were the books of the summer, Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom and Jennifer Egan‘s A Visit from the Goon Squad share the dying-light chill of autumn, uneasy reminders that the honey of nostalgia soon ferments into the vinegar of regret. […]
Spend any summertime in the lowland South and it won’t be long until some Cracker Barrel Confucius allows as how it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity, yessir, it surely is. As in, we tolerate foot-blistering temperatures most every day […]
Roland White was there at the beginning. When the White brothers, Dillards, Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and like-minded young pickers added bluegrass to the folk revival blossoming on college campuses and at clubs such as LA’s Ash Grove. And when he […]
New York may be America’s biggest city but it lives like a collection of villages that shelter those with the same passions, daily pursuits, or simply the love of their particular corner of the metropolis. The city’s musical history is […]
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