George Jones’ brief stint at United Artists is sometimes cited as a kind of personal golden age for the singer, and it’s easy to see why. He recorded some of his signature hits for the label — “The Race Is […]
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Solomon Burke’s trio of recent albums marked one of this new century’s most welcome “comebacks.” His 2006 disc Nashville was the strongest yet, a perfect combination of singer and concept: Producer Buddy Miller helped Burke choose some great old songs, […]
Though the cover remains mum on the subject, this single disc collects the entirety of Norma Jean’s 1972 album I Guess That Comes Being Poor and her 1968 LP Body And Mind — and tosses in all but three of […]
There may be no more impenetrable roadblock to the enjoyment and evaluation of music (and art generally) than the matter of taste. Yet while it’s always lurking about even when it goes unmentioned — call it the Taste Card — […]
Jerry Wallace had his first significant hits on the pop charts. The Nashville-sounding “Primrose Lane” went top-10 in 1959, and five years later, his considerably more charming “In The Misty Moonlight”, a Cindy Walker-penned ballad that Wallace sang in a […]
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, […]
Though the cover remains mum on the subject, this single disc collects the entirety of Norma Jean’s 1972 album I Guess that Comes Being Poor and her 1968 LP Body And Mind — and tosses in all but three of […]
“Ain’t Done Nothin’”, the self-penned kiss-off that begins Lisa O’Kane’s It Don’t’ Hurt, is a rocking little middle-finger of a record. “I’m thinkin’ maybe you could use a change of scenery,” she sneers at her one-time paramour. “I’m thinkin’…’bout a […]
Proud To Be An Okie is the most important volume of country music history to emerge in years, a worthy companion to Gerald Haslam’s similarly west-coast-centered Working Man Blues from 1999. Drawing upon everything from old fan magazines to the […]
Chuck Brown didn’t exactly invent the club-crazy offshoot of funk and soul known as go-go. But he did more than anyone else to nurture its birth and codify a sound. It was Brown and his Soul Survivors who, in Washington, […]
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