Robert Earl Keen - Farm Fresh Onions
"It's the little things," Robert Earl Keen once sang with switchblade humor, "that piss me off." Here, it's the little things that elevate a typically solid selection of material from the veteran troubadour into the most musically compelling album of Keen'
Unfinished Business: The Life And Times Of Danny Gatton
Danny Gatton was not "the world's greatest unknown guitar player," although many national magazines and local television stations swore to it. Quite a few people knew exactly who he was. Many professional musicians (especially those with an ear to the ground) had heard -- and heard about
Merle Haggard - Branded man
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am huge, I contain multitudes.)
-- Walt Whitman ("Song Of Myself")
It says here that Merle Haggard is our greatest living singer and songwriter. Country singer and songwriter, if you must limit him.
Just do not argue the
Handsome Family - Tragic songs of life
On an early September evening, across the U.S.A., a million little girls -- and quite a few boys, too -- gasp suddenly, struck by a fleeting spasm of pain. The origin of this mysterious discomfort? Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, who has just expressed a sentiment so profane, it
Glen Bonham - Bluegrass blooded
While some might think a man of Choctaw-British descent an unlikely candidate to become a bluegrass star, that's exactly what Glen Bonham has turned out to be.
Bonham has played with the likes of Bill Monroe, Ricky Skaggs and Jimmy Martin, and is constantly in demand on
Various Artists - Country Got Soul, Volume One
Although much less broad in scope and goal and coming from a different perspective, the Country Got Soul compilation has an against-the-grain mission statement similar to that of 1998's three-disc From Where I Stand: The Black Experience In Country Music box set. Whereas From Where