Strawberry Music Festival - Camp Mather (Yosemite, CA)
Held just outside of Yosemite National Park, the twice-annual Strawberry Music Festival offers great music amidst warm, sunny days and cool, clear evenings in a pastoral green field surrounded by tall pines. The festival is usually held every Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend, but this year's
Bill Monroe: 1911-1996 - Ryman Auditorium (Nashville, TN)
Peter Rowan tells a story about touring Europe as one of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. As they were going through customs, an agent stopped Monroe and, looking at his passport, asked his name. "Bill Monroe," he said. Then the agent inquired about his occupation. "Father
Jason & The Scorchers - The Scorch will Rise Again
The year is 1982, on the Sunday before Labor Day; the place is Cat's Records, on West End Avenue in Nashville. A thousand people have packed the store's parking lot to see Jason & the Scorchers, who in the past year have taken the city by
Pine State - An echo, louder now
Just put aside all of the superficial cataclysmic spectacle-related bullshit -- the uncontrolled onstage fires; the sledgehammered toilet; the raw chicken. The hulking 6-foot-8 freak in full basketball getup (plus gas mask), swinging wildly from the end of a leash. The band's very own cigar-chomping,
Iris Dement - Homespun of the Brave
Iris DeMent is belting out a protest song called "Wasteland Of The Free" to a packed house in Lawrence, Kansas, and even though the song is downright radical in a way that's hardly heard in this country anymore, the response is decidedly enthusiastic. The focus of
Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music's Greatest Singer
When I first read this book's subtitle, I thought the author's view might be a little slanted. When I finished the book, I realized he was only stating the facts.
Cooper gives the reader the good, the bad and the ugly in both Lefty's