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Grant Alden

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Missing Years

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Missing Years

These days, alas, there is no danger of wobbling late Friday night 10 blocks over to Peaches Records and looking for love in the cut-out bins. (Oh, but that Legendary Christine Perfect album.) The habit never entirely leaves, even as it becomes more difficult to justify what sneaks through the

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Judds Tribute, Jon Dee Graham, and More

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: The Judds Tribute, Jon Dee Graham, and More

Perhaps we should reconsider last column's comment about the manufactured consent of celebrity and commerce so as to add a needed caveat, borrowed from a children's book by Lloyd Alexander: The work doesn't care who does it. And the best work, the work which

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Drive-by Truckers, Malcolm Holcombe, and Others Doing the Damn Work

FOUNDERS’ KEEPERS: Drive-by Truckers, Malcolm Holcombe, and Others Doing the Damn Work

EDITOR’S NOTE: Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden were the original editors of No Depression, launching it as a print magazine covering alt-country (whatever that is) in 1995 and steering it through 75 issues until 2008. While they’re no longer part of the staff, they’re still very much

Ray Price's "Night Life": An appreciation

Every once in a while, it is necessary to obsess about a song. And so I have come here to confess that Ray Price's 1963 recording of "Night Life" is so extraordinary as to be out of time, a singular event, a startling sound across the

Ruby Johnson: A glorious (re)discovery

The twenty sides Ruby Johnson recorded for Stax/Volt in 1966-68 were finally released in something like album format in 1993, assembled under the title of the first track, I'll Run Your Hurt Away. It appears to have been reissued subsequently -- somewhere -- with seven additional tracks

The revival of Chip Robinson, backslider

In the shadows of memory I remain convinced that once I saw the Backsliders, of Raleigh, North Carolina, perform. This is probably not true, because generally I associate such things with specific venues and other oddments. In my memory, they were on the fateful bill with Whiskeytown at SXSW, that

Jompson Brothers: I have seen the future

of rock 'n' roll. If it has a future. Which is not to pile upon Chris Stapleton's new group any of the foolishness which Dave Marsh's breathless, glorious, joyous hyperbole racked up for Bruce Springsteen. This is not Time magazine, and the Jompsons owe