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Innocence Mission - Birds Of My Neighborhood

When I was a kid, growing up in deepest South Texas, our family used to make an annual wintertime pilgrimage to Colorado to go skiing. My mental kinescope reel of those trips always renders them in stark black-and-white, a series of sensations as well as images -- landscapes covered in

Blue Mountain - Tales Of A Traveler

Following the release of their marvelous 1995 disc Dog Days, Oxford, Mississippi, band Blue Mountain looked to be on the verge of becoming one of the cornerstone bands of alt-country. Their particular blend of roots-rock holds the kind of broad appeal that could potentially connect with an audience the size

Holy Modal Rounders - The Holy Modal Rounders 1 & 2

The guitarist strums a simple instrumental figure; he's soon joined by the fiddler sawing an age-old melody. The duo then assay an uneasy vocal harmony, one voice pinched and reedy, the other (rendered "normal" only by comparison) lower, more controlled, but marked by distinctive rough edges.

Various Artists - Poor Little Knitter On The Road: A Tribute To The Knitters

The Knitters were little more than a pimple on a pimple on the face of rock 'n' roll history. Rising from the fertile club scene of mid-'80s Hollywood, the loose-knit crew seemed like a lost weekend among L.A. punks (X's John Doe, Exene

Various Artists - Violin, Sing The Blues For Me: African-American Fiddlers, 1926-1949

The title of this collection of black string- and jug-band recordings isn't just a figure of speech. Every fiddle here talks, and not just as another voice within the instrumental ensemble, but as a voice that utters the words of the song -- the lyrics. Much as the

Bob Childers - Travelin' Woody's road

It's Sunday afternoon during the final hours of the five-day Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Bob Childers has spent the better part of the week holding court with everyone from journalists to polite town folks, members of the Guthrie family, fellow

Anita Carter: 03/1933 to 07/29/1999

At the first, it must have seemed she hardly existed outside the arms of the energetic and surprisingly determined relatives everywhere around her. For a long time Anita Carter did not know that she'd been born (in March 1933) into a family that would be a legend. But