Grant Britt

It sounds just like you'd expect from some good ol’ boys who named their band after a salamander. After a 30-year hiatus, the reunited and expanded version of Athens, Georgia's Chickasaw Mudd Puppies pumps out bluesy, Southern rocky swamp metal. In the early 1990s, founders

Carter Sampson specializes in plain talk. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter doesn't fool around much with metaphors, she just hauls off and punches you right in the gut. “I sent you a drunk text / And I meant it,” she admits on “Drunk Text,” from her latest offering, Gold. “I

To hell, with snakes, could be David Childers' mantra. Since his 1994 debut, Godzilla, He Done Broke Out, he's been a hellish tour guide, leading a series of bands from the Mount Holly Hellcats to the Modern Don Juans to the Serpents of Reformation, now doing business

Eric Bibb has built a career as Mr. Mellow with his soft-spoken, bluesy folk meanderings since his 1972 debut, Ain't It Grand. For his latest, Ridin', the global griot, soulful troubadour, street preacher, and mellow bluesman continues down the same trail, but never wears it out.

Harlan Howard's definition of country music as three chords and the truth is almost as famous as the songs he wrote to back up that quote he made in the 1950s. The prolific country songwriter turned out more than 4,000 tunes covered by a who's-

Joe Louis Walker has been to church and back. Roommate Mike Bloomfield's 1981 death from an accidental overdose shook Walker so thoroughly that the young guitarist went from wallowing with heathens including Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix to soaring to lofty heights with the Spiritual Corinthians Gospel Quartet.