Michelle Shocked - Deep Natural
In 1993, on the very day Michelle Shocked went to record the follow-up to Arkansas Traveler, her record label imprisoned her artistically. She says they refused to issue a check for recording expenses, told her they wouldn't promote her catalog, and restricted her from recording on her own.
Mickey Newbury - A Long Road Home
"Do you still have your dreams?"
Mickey Newbury drops this question about halfway through his new album's title track, one of two songs on the disc that clock in on the long side of ten minutes. Newbury has sketched plenty of three-minute vignettes ripe for radio
John Cohen – The Image Of American Music
John Cohen is best-known as an original member of the New Lost City Ramblers, founders of the modern old-time music movement, with whom he has sung and played string instruments since 1958. Cohen helped bring such legends as Clarence “Tom” Ashley and Dock Boggs north to revitalize their careers during
"Love and Theft" The Veiled but Tangled Roots of Jimmie Rodgers and Tommy Johnson
Most people tend to view blues and country music as the province, by turns, of black and white cultures. Nothing wrong with that, really; with few exceptions, the greatest blues singers have been African-American, while the best honky-tonkers have been of European descent. And there's no denying that
Mark Insley - Maybe he'll just go to Tucson
For several years singer-songwriter Mark Insley has been living in Ventura, California, and gigging around regional hot spots such as Bakersfield and Los Angeles' now-defunct Palomino Club. Yet from the sound of the title track on his new album Tucson, he seems ready for a change of scenery.
In
Chris Thomas King - O brother, who art thou?
The Coen brothers couldn't have scripted a stranger irony than the musical resurrection of Chris Thomas King. After years of refusing to submit to traditionalist strictures -- resisting the pressures of a record industry that couldn't accept his streetwise raps and hip-hop samples as a natural