Charlie Sexton - The Austin Kid
A few weeks before my most recent conversation with Charlie Sexton, my daughters were flipping through some family photos and found a real howler. Some guy in his early 20s with wild, bushy hair, a wisp of a beard, wearing a pink-and-white striped tank top (a muscle shirt showing little
Eric McConnell - Eight-track mind
From his front porch on Boscobel Street in East Nashville, cannot see the managers, publicists and record execs who inhabit the glass-walled office buildings and converted homes known as Music Row, where banners, painted bus stop benches and tattered handbills trumpet the successes of the Music City's best-known
Reconsidering rock's dark ages
One of pop music's most beloved myths is the one about how the Beatles brought rock 'n' roll back from the dead. It goes something like this...
Rock 'n' roll passed away on or about February 2, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and
Pieta Brown - In The Cool
The eldest of singer-songwriter Greg Brown's three daughters, Pieta Brown divided her youth between her father's bare-bones Iowa farmhouse and her physician mother's home in Birmingham, Alabama. Which is to say that she comes by her easy blend of rustic folk roots and languid
Bobby Purify - Better To Have It
Better To Have It is a southern soul summit of sorts, thanks to the reappearance of Bobby Purify, the gathering of such session kings as David Hood, Spooner Oldham and Reggie Young, and the continued re-emergence of Dan Penn, who co-wrote twelve of this disc's thirteen songs and
Willie Nelson - Countryman
When Willie Nelson dueted with Toots Hibbert on "Still Is Still Moving To Me", a tune written by Nelson but performed on Toots & the Maytals' 2004 album True Love, it wasn't merely an occasion to wonder which singer brought better ganja to the session.