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Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline's Letters To A Friend

In the fall of 1955, Patsy Cline struck up a correspondence with Treva Miller, a teenage country music fan from Tennessee, who wrote offering to set up a fan club. Cline, who'd just released her first single, "A Church, A Courtroom And Then Goodbye", the previous

Michael Hurley - Primary Colors

No matter the circumstance, Michael Hurley is a quintessential practitioner of the less-is-more dictum. As a writer of riveting and timeless songs, his phrases are short and potent, in service to verses at once elegantly concise and mysteriously layered. In conversation he favors one-word answers, though if he's

Map Of Wyoming - Beating the retreat

A round trip, indeed -- not to mention rather long and a little bit strange. Dale Duncan -- self-proclaimed "art director" of the collective known as Map Of Wyoming, whose self-released debut CD is titled Round Trip -- truly has come full circle. Point A, circa 1984, was

Kris Kristofferson - Partly truth and partly fiction

[Editor's note: Writer and musician Roxy Gordon published a monthly newspaper called Picking Up The Tempo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1970s that covered outlaw-country music. Nowadays he lives in the small West Texas town of Talpa and writes a weekly column for the Coleman County newspaper.

East River Pipe - The Gasoline Age

It's unfortunate that one of rock's most threadbare myths -- "great art is produced through great personal pain" -- is supported by so damn much compelling work. You don't have to scratch far beyond the surface of this cliche to turn up

Cindy Bullens - Somewhere Between Heaven And Earth

Cindy Bullens emerged in 1978 as something of a distaff Springsteen, fronting a rock band specializing in a dramatic, urban street mythos. Her muscular debut Desire Wire was a knockout, but its 1979 follow-up Steal The Night flagged noticeably, and Bullens pulled back to focus on songwriting and session work.

Tony Rice - Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen

West Coast roots-music pioneers Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen join forces once again with bluegrass/new acoustic titans Tony Rice and Larry Rice for a follow-up to their 1996 debut Out Of The Woodwork. Perhaps as the result of some touring, the foursome emerges as a more cohesive band, in