Archive

Live albums have a tortuous history, serving all too often as mere tour souvenirs, stopgaps between studio works, or fulfillments of contractual obligations. It's a rare live album that stands on its own as a complete and significant artistic statement. Lucinda Williams' first concert album, Live At

Any recording that begins with invocations of whiskey, the devil, a full moon and mountains rolling to the sea to the accompaniment of a banjo industriously plinked in counterpoint to a fiddle and a harmonica is worth paying attention to. When that first song is topped by the next song,

Lord knows Charlie Poole deserves a box set; he's only the father of country banjo, more or less. But at first I questioned whether he deserved this box set. That's because Poole is on only 43 of the 72 tracks gathered here; the others are by

If sales figures were a guiding compass, Doug Sahm was at best a minor regional artist who enjoyed brief pop chart success in the mid-to-late 1960s. But given his sphere of influence as a Texas musician -- he was the Texas musician who could play all the roots sounds, from

In the liner notes to this 24-song anthology, compiler Jonathan Fischer shares history and insights that overlap with such works as Bill C. Malone's Country Music, U.S.A., Barney Hoskyns' Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted, John Lomax III's Nashville: Music City USA