Doug Sahm & The Sir Douglas Quintet - The Complete Mercury Recordings
If sales figures were a guiding compass, Doug Sahm was at best a minor regional artist who enjoyed brief pop chart success in the mid-to-late 1960s. But given his sphere of influence as a Texas musician -- he was the Texas musician who could play all the roots sounds,
Charlie Poole - You Ain't Talkin' To Me: Charlie Poole And The Roots Of Country Music
Lord knows Charlie Poole deserves a box set; he's only the father of country banjo, more or less. But at first I questioned whether he deserved this box set. That's because Poole is on only 43 of the 72 tracks gathered here; the others are by
Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodruiguez - Red Dog Tracks
Any recording that begins with invocations of whiskey, the devil, a full moon and mountains rolling to the sea to the accompaniment of a banjo industriously plinked in counterpoint to a fiddle and a harmonica is worth paying attention to.
When that first song is topped by the next song,
Lucinda Williams - Live At The Fillmore
Live albums have a tortuous history, serving all too often as mere tour souvenirs, stopgaps between studio works, or fulfillments of contractual obligations. It's a rare live album that stands on its own as a complete and significant artistic statement.
Lucinda Williams' first concert album, Live At
Dierks Bentley - Are you ready for the country?
Like a lot of music-crazed friends of mine have done over the years, he showed up just a little bit late, because he was curious to hear – no, needed to hear – that new album by Shooter Jennings, Waylon's son, which was just out. And while he was
Mickey Newbury: Crystal & Stone
With the stubborn integrity he brought to every aspect of his life, Mickey Newbury fashioned an uncategorizable song catalogue of abiding excellence and ensured that his commercial possibilities would always be limited. In Crystal & Stone, biographer Joe Ziemer shows how that was all of a piece with Newbury'