Seldom Scene - Dream Scene / Sam Bush - Glamour & Grits
This is overdue, and maybe he'll never see it, but I owe a lot to a long-retired Seattle DJ and (I think, still) Pioneer Square bouncer named Tiny Freeman. He had a Sunday night bluegrass show on KRAB-FM, a community radio station (pre-college radio) that
Willard Grant Conspiracy - 3am Sunday @ Fortune Otto's
Simplicity is ravishing. Here's a record that has no liner notes except the statement, "Anyone who tells you they played on this, probably did." The songs are not listed anywhere on the package -- except for the actual CD, which is in the player, which means you
Slim Dunlap - Times Like This
There's this country ditty near the end of Times Like This called "Nowheres Near". It tells the story of a band that hasn't been noticed after "20 fucking years." The band is having tryouts to replace the bassist, axed for being too
Del McCoury Band - The Cold Hard Facts
The father of bluegrass may have recently passed away, but the high-lonesome bluesiness of Bill Monroe can still be found in the music of the Del McCoury Band. Their recent string of albums for Rounder are perhaps the finest examples of traditional bluegrass in the '90s, and their
Ian Tyson - All the Good 'Uns
Keats once said of Shakespeare, "He lived a life of allegory." So it is with Ian Tyson. As a young songwriter, he left his native Canada to follow Dylan's lead during the folk revival but returned to build a fascinating mythology of the West. His chronicles,
Jimmy Webb - Ten Easy Pieces
For better or for worse, I must own up to the fact that my record collection contains approximately 250 different versions of the 10 songs on this disc. And while it may say something about my sanity (or lack thereof) that I spent countless hours in 1993 and '94