John Fahey - America
The John Fahey canon is a decreasingly mysterious thing. For that, you can thank Fantasy Records. Over the past year or so, Fantasy has reissued some of Fahey's most obscure and mythologized releases from his own Takoma label. While Blind Joe Death and The Voice Of The Turtle
Ray Price - The Other Woman
Ray Price's chart career usually gets talked about as if it has two distinct periods. First there are the great honky-tonk years that included masterpiece singles such as "Crazy Arms", and then there's his crappy, post-"Danny Boy" countrypolitan hits like "
Dwight Yoakam - A Long Way Home / Various Artists - Will Sing For Food: The Songs Of Dwight Yoakam
Quick -- name three Dwight Yoakam songs.
Not as easy as you'd think, is it? Nothing against the man's songwriting abilities, but let's face facts here: "Songwriting" is not the first word that leaps to mind when one ponders the components of
Jim & Dave Boquist - 400 Bar (Minneapolis, MN)
"We thought there might be about 50 people here," said Jim Boquist. Guess again. The small 400 Bar was flirting with an over-capacity crowd, maybe five times what Jim and his brother Dave had expected. The doorman was turning people away even before the Boquists hit the stage
Greg Garing's Alphabet City Opry - 9C (New York City, NY)
Greg Garing's otherworldly voice nearly overtakes his bone-thin luminosity, soaring sweet and achingly powerful, then dipping in a hushed outcast cry. "Blues In My Heart" perfectly collapses any resistance to hillbilly music. When "old-timer" Ward Verity joins at the single mike, the high, tender
Liquor Giants - Every Other Day At A Time
That Ward Dotson sure is a versatile son of a Gun Club. In addition to serving in the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce's swamp-bluesy outfit, Dotson co-founded the appealingly Stonesy Pontiac Brothers and played in both the Hello Strangers and girl-group revivalists the Pussywillows. His current project Liquor Giants,