If guitarist Mason Williams hadn’t ventured to Aspen in the winter of 1960, he might never have written the song that made him famous: “Classical Gas.” Williams, then a 21-year-old college student, was playing gigs in Oklahoma City with a folk group called the Wayfarers Trio. Since Aspen was a…
The Blasters, the pioneering roots-rock band from blue-collar Downey, California, were part of the early-’80s L.A. punkabilly scene that also spawned Los Lobos, X, the Germs and others. Led by brothers Phil and Dave Alvin and famous for their incendiary live shows, the Blasters recorded just three studio albums and…
There’s a scene in the Coen Brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? in which a promoter by the name of Mr. French drops in at a rural Mississippi radio station to see if he can track down the Soggy Bottom Boys, whose song, “I Am a Man of Constant…
On his most recent album, The Rock: Stone Cold Country 2001, George Jones teams with Garth Brooks to sing a good old-fashioned drinking song called “Beer Run.” It’s about getting off work, jumping in the pickup truck and making a beeline for the liquor store — pretty tame stuff, especially…
Whenever and wherever Junior Brown performs, you can bet your Telecaster that a gaggle of guitar geeks will be standing in front of the stage, their mouths wide open, drooling over Brown’s frenzied fretwork on “Big Red,” his custom-made guit-steel. The hybrid instrument, which combines an electric guitar with a…
The year 2001 produced its share of catastrophes: major terrorist campaigns in D.C. and New York, a widespread anthrax scare — and J. Lo’s solo debut. Fortunately, there’s plenty worth remembering about the first official year of the new millennium, as artists of every genre proved that music still matters,…
In 1964, a 22-year-old college dropout named Peter Rowan joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys for what would turn out to be a three-year stint playing guitar and singing lead vocals. Thirty-five years later, it’s clear that the father of bluegrass left an indelible impression on Rowan, even if his…
Back in the 1980s, singer Shelby Lynne was supposed to be Nashville’s Next Big Thang — she even recorded a duet with George Jones — but the girl from Alabama never quite jibed with Music Row’s by-the-numbers approach to music-making. After putting out five critically acclaimed but poorly selling albums,…
There’s a great story behind Roots Volume 1, Merle Haggard’s delightful new disc, his second for the Anti- label. By chance, Haggard discovered that Norman Stephens, who played lead guitar on some of Lefty Frizzell’s 1950s recordings, lived just fifty miles from Haggard’s Northern California home. Frizzell, one of country…
If anyone deserves a tribute album, it’s Hank Williams, who died on January 1, 1953, in the back of his chauffeured Cadillac touring car, on the way to a one-nighter in Canton, Ohio. He was just 29 years old, yet he had created a body of work that set the…
One of the enduring myths about the Grateful Dead is that they were better live than in the studio. According to their legion of fans, the cultish Deadheads, the best way to experience the band was in concert, where, depending on the vibe — and the acid — anything might…
Like his good friend Johnny Cash, whose last three albums were among his best, Bob Dylan is on a late-career roll. Four years ago, he graced us with Time Out of Mind, a somber meditation on love and life. Dylan was 56 at the time; his voice was shot, and…
For years, bluegrass was easily one of the most male-dominated musical genres around. All the biggest stars were men, and their bands were all made up of “boys.” Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Stanley Brothers and the…
When an album opens with a cover of Richard Thompson’s dark and brooding “Keep Your Distance,” you know you’d better fasten your seatbelt: It’s going to be a bumpy ride. On their first official album as a couple, Buddy and Julie Miller take us down love’s lost highway, where trouble’s…
When Gillian Welch’s debut album, Revival, appeared in 1996, some music fans questioned the singer’s authenticity. How, they wondered, could someone who was born in New York City and grew up in affluent West Los Angeles have the nerve to write about being “an orphan on God’s highway” or having…
Three years ago, just after her first solo album, The Virginian, made a big (and well-deserved) splash, Neko Case confessed to a reporter, “I want to play the Grand Ole Opry in my grandmother’s lifetime.” That a former punk rocker — she played drums in the all-girl trio Maow –…
When Norman Blake performs at Swallow Hill on Saturday night, more than a few audience members will probably be there because they bought the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a wonderful collection of rootsy country music. On it, the 63-year-old Blake performs two numbers: “You Are…
This long-awaited four-CD collection contains nearly every song commercially released by Buffalo Springfield, the short-lived but seminal Los Angeles-based rock band. In fact, disc four presents, in their entirety, newly remastered versions of the group’s first two albums: Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again, its masterpiece. And most of the…
Now that twangy, Appalachian-rooted singers like Dolly Parton and Patty Loveless have effectively been banished from the country-music airwaves, where lowest-common-denominator blandness rules, there’s only one thing left for a hillbilly girl to do: put out a bluegrass album. Two years ago, Parton jump-started her singing career with the critically…
