Tony Joe White - One Hot July
Rising up grumpily from a sticky bed made of a swirling B-3, stinging guitar and insistent, on-the-one tub-thumping, the too-long-AWOL Polk Salad Tony thickly slurs the album's sultry opening command: "Crack the window, baby, it's hot in this bedroom/
George Jones - A Picture Of Me (Without You) / Nothing Ever Hurt Me (Half As Bad As Losing You)
You aren't ever going to catch me complaining when Koch reissues old George Jones albums, but, in a couple of ways, it does seem an odd decision to package these two particular early-'70s LPs, Jones' second and third with Epic producer Billy Sherrill, on a
Dr. West's Medicine Show & Junk Band - Euphoria! The Best of...
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
Gene Autry - The Singing Cowboy, Chapter Two / With His Little Darlin' Mary Lee
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
Ray Charles - The Complete Country & Western Recordings: 1959-1986
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
Various Artists - Real: The Tom T. Hall Project
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