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The official punk rock party line is that punk is the most democratic of all types of music because you don't even know how to play your instrument to be in a band. But for me, as a youngster in the late 1960s, it was jug-band music that

My father had the wrong Gene Autry album, but I played it many times. The Original Gene Autry Sings Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. The title was ambiguous: Original should have referred to the song, Autry's best-known composition (the second-biggest selling single in history), but in my memory the

Nearly four decades later, it's hard to imagine just how bold Ray Charles' 1961 album Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music must have sounded to the unsuspecting listener. A country record from the Genius of Soul? You put the needle to the record, hear Charles shout

He got his start in bluegrass, but movies came first. Tom T. Hall traveled around Kentucky with Hurley Curtis ("Uncle Curt") and brought movies to the small towns, and the boy would make announcements as the reels spun: "Over at Jones's Grocery they've

In his introductory note, Bruce Springsteen describes Tracks as "the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records." That's a fair assessment of much, but not all, of the music contained on this sprawling, four-CD set, which up to now had