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A commanding singer with a broad, expressive range, a deep knowledge of country idioms and some 30 years of experience in the music business, Suzanne Thomas remains largely unknown. In large part this is because she's spent the past decade as part of the Dry Branch Fire Squad,

For Marques Bovre & the Evil Twins, there are two sides to every coin. Bovre grew up in the tiny Sugar River village of Paoli, Wisconsin, but he remembers taking the 8 a.m. Badger Bus into Madison most weekends, finding relief in a place so big that nobody knew

In a 1986 article about Delta blues singer Robert Johnson, Greil Marcus observed that blues was music born not of enslavement, but of liberation. "For the first time," he wrote, "[blacks] were acting like free people, and running into the wall that separates desire from its realization.

Turning down Pearl Street into the Southern gothic neighborhood of Cabbagetown near downtown Atlanta, Amy Pike belts out her take on Big Joe Turner's "Love Roller Coaster" over the car stereo: "I've got atomic power," she croons, "Going a thousand miles

This is the stuff honky-tonk legends are made of. For 25 years, James Hand, 45, has been playing at the Tokio Store, the honky-tonk owned by his brother Bimbo in their hometown of Tokio, Texas, a remote rural burg just north of Waco. Since the early '70s he has