Grant Alden

We learned by heart most of the words to “This Land Is Your Land” in second grade, the year the duck and cover drills ended and I was fitted for black-rimmed glasses. Most of the words, that is, because we were second graders and, really, it was all about pounding

This is going to be about The Bottle Rockets, the other alt-country band from St. Louis, that graced the cover of the original magazine twice (even though the second time we all knew the futility of the gesture). But it's going to take a while to get there.

It began here, in the safety of the suburbs, black vinyl spinning in someone's back room, George Harrison bragging on John Lennon during the bridge in the Beatles' “For You Blue,” a minor track from 1970's Let It Be“: “Elmore James got nothin' on

Near the bottom of my stack of indifferently folded black t-shirts rests a relic from 2003, a wry marker from the career of the late Nashville singer-songwriter David Olney. “David Olney's World Tour of Nashville,” the back reads, listing six performances over six days. Those Music City shows,

Twenty-five years ago Mary Gauthier was a singing chef — a novelty from Baton Rouge, who was trying to find her voice and hold on to her sobriety in deepest Boston — gambling there might be an audience willing to listen to an album of hard-won songs titled Drag Queens In Limousines.