Billy Cowsill: 1948 to 2006
When he passed away February 18 at age 58, William Joseph "Billy" Cowsill's obituary writers boiled his life down to a single story. As a teen, he fronted the Cowsills, a family act that enjoyed a brief but memorable run on the charts with bubblegum hits
Buck Owens: 1929 to 2006
To the country intelligentsia, Buck Owens' joyous iconoclasm made him a pivotal figure. His twangy, streamlined Bakersfield honky-tonk gave him 26 top-10 hits on the Billboard country chart; 21 of them went to #1, including 15 between 1963 and 1967. Not surprisingly, the masses viewed him mainly as a
Ain't Got No Cigarettes: Memories Of Music Legend Roger Miller
Every serious Roger Miller fan will want to read this book, and every one of them will be frustrated. Ain't Got No Cigarettes is only what its subtitle says: a series of interview transcriptions done by Lyle Style who, after discovering Roger Miller at the late date of
James Hand - The Truth Will Set You Free
There are country performers who take pains to maintain an ironic detachment from their material; no matter how emotionally riven a song's character may be, he's still an actor fretting on the stage of the singer's imagination. "Hey," the musician seems to
Various Artists - Sail Away: The Songs Of Randy Newman
Remaking a Randy Newman song is as hopeless a concept as remaking a Woody Allen movie. You can get the punchlines right, and maybe strike the right emotional notes, but without the auteur's neurotic, forlorn imprint, what are you left with? A serviceable vehicle at best, a painfully
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris - All The Roadrunning
Perhaps the highest compliment that could be bestowed on this record is that if you didn't know about Mark Knopfler's Dire Straits days or Emmylou's Gram Parsons past and subsequent solo flowering, you might well suspect these two have been singing partners for a