Butch Hancock - The Wind's Dominion
It's tempting to call The Wind's Dominion Butch Hancock's Blonde On Blonde, given that Hancock has often been referred to as "the West Texas Dylan," and that this epic double-album arguably stands as his greatest studio achievement. Originally released in 1979,
Mary McCaslin - Way Out West
"I tried to be a cowboy but I could not hold a gun," sang Mary McCaslin on her 1973 album Way Out West. Her confession was literal as well as metaphorical.
McCaslin first fell under the spell of TV westerns and the gunfighter ballads of Marty Robbins when
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 the
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