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Chris Whitley - Hotel Vast Horizon

Hotel Vast Horizon begins with a breath, the briefest of exhalations, a sigh almost. A snare drum stirs. And Chris Whitley takes his post as a tour guide into the "New Lost World". Whitley can rock, sure, but at his best he's a master of mood

Otis Taylor - Truth Is Not Fiction

Winner of the distinguished W.C. Handy Best New Artist blues award in 2002, Otis Taylor certainly deserved the recognition, though he was hardly new. A seasoned bluesman whose career dates back to the 1960s, Taylor became discouraged with the business and gave it up for antiquing in the late

Various Artists - Kentucky Mountain Music: Classic Recordings Of The 1920s & 1930s

Kentucky has long held a special allure for folk song scholars, collectors of hillbilly 78s, revivalists and other aficionados of old-time music. It's a near-mythical place in the minds of these folks, a place where fact and legend often overlap. It's a plain fact, however, that

Joe Callicott - Ain't A Gonna Lie To You

In 1929, Mississippi's Joe Callicott made a trip to Memphis with his friend Garfield Akers to record for Vocalion. Callicott's solo recordings never saw the light of day; only "Cottonfield Blues (Parts 1 And 2)", with Callicott backing Akers, was released. A year later,

Courtney Lee Adams Jr. - Western to East Village

Onstage at the Lakeside Lounge, at the last in a series of shows marking the release of her long-awaited debut album, Courtney Lee Adams Jr. is pissed. "I've got my bitch on tonight!" she promises the audience. She tosses in rants about a bad cab ride

Todd Steed - Sphere of influence

Todd Steed can remember the first song he ever wrote about Knoxville. He was in a punk band in the early 1980s called the Real Hostages: "We would write about the local radio station, and how we hated it," he says. It was the beginning of a music

Townes Van Zandt - In the Beginning

No one would ever mistake Townes Van Zandt for Red Foley, not even before the ravages of drugs and booze rendered his vocals brittle and unsure; near the end, his voice was the sound of dissipation itself. And it'd be a stretch to say that Townes is crooning