(This is reposted and adapted from my String Theory Media blog) Last week, Music City Roots: Live From The Loveless Cafe closed its second season with what feels like incredible momentum. With each passing week, it seems like our audience […]
Can a blueblood go bluegrass? Mike Henderson, the veteran Nashville guitarist/songwriter/bandleader who has explained his style as half Muddy Waters and half Bill Monroe, is tilting toward the latter and making the transition with aplomb. For two decades, Henderson has […]
The apparent effortlessness with which Emmylou Harris performs songs can belie her tenacity in finding and internalizing them in the first place. One anecdote in Peter Cooper’s track-by-track notes on Songbird has Harris stalking a mystery song she heard on […]
There’s no better view from a festival stage than the one in Telluride, Colorado, facing vast escarpments, waterfalls and Lord of the Rings-worthy peaks. It’s easy to mark first-time performers because no matter how hip they are, the massive box […]
When he was spending long hours with Flatt & Scruggs records in college, Gene Wooten thought he was teaching himself banjo. It turned out he was laying the foundations of one of the celebrated Nashville dobro careers. “There was always […]
In every respect but talent, think of Dan Tyminski as the anti-Jimmy Martin. While Martin, one of bluegrass music’s great vocalists, is an eccentric infamous for his abrasive ways, Tyminski is an unabashedly good egg: a self-effacing, small-town man, husband, […]
The best bluegrass music of 1999 came from artists with some mileage on their tires, if you will. Del McCoury, John Hartford, Dolly Parton and Dudley Connell are among the seasoned voices who have recently repudiated, with grace and depth, […]
Dudley Connell’s distinctive, throaty voice was, for many years, one of the aural hallmarks of the dynamic Johnson Mountain Boys. Don Rigsby’s crystalline tenor provides the hair-raising high harmony for the Lonesome River Band. More recently, the two found themselves […]
Guy Clark’s performances are striking for the charisma they put on display, but perhaps even more so for what they hold in reserve. When his massive frame resonates with his outoorsman’s voice, you don’t hear the laying bare of a […]
Creoles, at the risk of oversimplifying, are the black, French-speaking people of Southwest Louisiana, and zydeco is the versatile term for their dances, dance halls and infectious dance music. Sometime in the 19th century, black musicians adopted the accordion-driven repertoire […]
