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Norman & Nancy Blake - The old-fashioned way

Outside the Sheldon Concert Hall in downtown St. Louis, someone steals a van parked next to Norman and Nancy Blake's camper. Inside the hall, the couple have finished a two-hour concert and are packing up to head to Lexington, Kentucky, before returning to their home in Rising Fawn,

Dan Penn And Spooner Oldham - Old souls

Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham begin Moments From This Theatre, their in-concert collection of chamber soul, with "I'm Your Puppet". The tempo is unhurried but insistent, with Penn's voice sweet and soulful, his gently picked acoustic guitar brushing up against Oldham's Wurlitzer

Tough company

There’s a lot of blowhard swaggering of my own in here,” Tom Russell writes in the afterword to Tough Company. The veteran singer-songwriter is being a little hard on himself. Tough Company is a literary grab-bag with more hits than misses, made up of Charles Bukowski’s letters to

John B. "Fritz" Richmond: 1939 to 2005

The undisputed all-time king and world champion of the jug and the washtub bass, Fritz Richmond lost a yearlong battle with lung cancer on November 20. His signature instruments now rest within the Smithsonian Institute's permanent collection. He really was that good. Born John B. Richmond Jr. in

Jelly Roll Morton - The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax (8 CDs, 3 books)

In 1938, Jelly Roll Morton, broke, aging and nearly forgotten at 53, lately playing piano in a Washington, D.C, dive called the Music Box, approached Alan Lomax -- all of 23, but already de facto director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. What he

Bob Dylan - No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7)

Among reviewers who have given faint praise to this two-disc soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film, dismissing it as a marginal addition to the Dylan canon, the common reservation is that the alternate takes here aren't as good as the released originals. Well, duh. No other artist has

Diesel Doug & The Long Haul Truckers - Mistakes Were Made (1995-2005)

With only two prior albums to their credit, a sixteen-song retrospective may seem premature. Then again, this is the group's tenth anniversary, those albums having come out back in the '90s. A few tracks appear on CD for the first time; a few songs have been re-recorded;