104 posts tagged with music and Americana.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 104. Subscribe:
"Music and humor are for the healing of the nations"
This post started as a single video of veteran musicmaker Leonard Solomon performing Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" on a homemade "Squijeeblion."
That led to discovering his YouTube channel @Bellowphone, full of similarly whimsical covers on a collection of bespoke instruments hand-built in his Wimmelbildian workshop, from the Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte to the Oomphalapompatronium to the original Majestic Bellowphone.
Searching for more videos led to his performance in the Lonesome Pine One-Man Band Extravaganza special from 1991, where he co-starred with whizbang vaudevillians like Hokum W. Jeebs and Professor Gizmo.
But what was Lonesome Pine? Just an extraordinary, award-winning concert series by the Kentucky Center for the Arts that ran for 16 years on public radio and television -- an "all things considered" showcase for "new artists, underappreciated veterans and those with unique new voices" featuring such luminaries as Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Koko Taylor, and hundreds more. You can get a broad overview of this televisual marvel from this excellent half-hour retrospective, see a supercut of director Clark Santee's favorite moments, browse the program directory from the Smithsonian exhibit, or watch select shows in their entirety: Lonesome Pine Blues - All-star Bluegrass Band - Nashville All-stars - Bass Instincts - Zydeco Rockers - Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Mark O'Connor - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Sam Bush & John Cowan - Maura O'Connell - Nanci Griffith - A Musical Visit from Africa [more inside]
What does it mean, Country Music, and why does it all sound the same
In the New Yorker:
Country music's Culture Wars and the remaking of Nashville. All about Music Row vs. what they're now labeling Americana, and more. Is Nashville Music Row anything other than "bro country, slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks"?
(archive link) [more inside]
(archive link) [more inside]
You got a fast car
“On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting… But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man.” On the complicated reaction to the Luke Comb’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.
Your favorite band is not my thing, but I admire your passion
"Saying goodbye to Steve, the reader who commented on everything I wrote for 17 years" -- reflections after death closes the door on an exchange of correspondence between a journalist/music critic and an older reader who was always willing to give something a listen.
Mississippi John Hurt Video Collection
Mississippi John Hurt Video Collection
Pretty much what it says on the tin, but, oh, the cameos — both aural and visual.
Pretty much what it says on the tin, but, oh, the cameos — both aural and visual.
"disgrace and pride, forgetting and remembering, change and stasis”
Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers: "The book is partly a band biography of the Drive-By Truckers, partly a travelogue through the South they depict in their songs, and partly an examination of the cultural and political underpinnings of their music. The chapters are all grounded in specific places—including the Shoals, Birmingham, Memphis, Richmond, and Athens, Georgia. Geography is more prominent than chronology, although it does trace their arc from southern rock band to American Band. That 2016 album is renowned for its very explicit political songwriting, but I argue that their songs have always had a political edge to them. They have always grappled with gun violence, income inequality, extremism of all kinds, the urban/rural divide, Confederate flag and monuments and Southern iconography in general, but for most of their career they did so through the filter of characters and stories and places. On American Band they confronted these matters very directly and very explicitly, which has carried over to The Unraveling and The New OK." (Bookshop/University of Texas Press) [more inside]
Themes, dreams and schemes - We're gonna need more ice!
Over 100 episodes broadcast between 2006 and 2009, Bob Dylan hosted "Theme Time Radio Hour". After a hiatus of 12 years ("I mean, does anybody even still have a radio? Some folks might even be listening on a smart toaster."), a new episode emerged in 2020: Whiskey (playlist). [more inside]
30 Years after: Uncle Tupelo's "No Depression"
Can’t Look Away: Musicians, Writers, and More Reflect on 30 Years of Uncle Tupelo’s ‘No Depression’. Thirty years (and one day) after Belleville, IL's Uncle Tupelo released their seminal alt-country album "No Depression", several current artists and writers talk about discovering the album, what it meant to them, and how it influenced them. Features Lilly Hiatt, Patterson Hood (of the Drive-By Truckers), Rhett Miller (of the Old 97s), Ben Nichols (of Lucero), Eric Earley (of Blitzen Trapper) and many more. [more inside]
how guarded he's been able to remain while talking a mile a minute…
Tall Tales With Dwight Yoakam: An intimate night of conversation and tunes with the hard-charging, mile-a-minute pioneer of honky-tonk himself (GQ) [more inside]
Drinking almost killed him; then it became his great subject
Jason Isbell’s Redemption Songs (GQ): A decade after bottoming out and cleaning up, Jason Isbell has become the last of his kind: a guitar-playing, compulsively honest, relentlessly consistent songwriter. Oh, and he slays on Twitter too. Zach Baron goes to Isbell's family home near Franklin, Tennessee, and finds there's no question the four-time Grammy winner won't answer.
Godmother of Rock and Roll
Rock-n-Roll was invented by a queer Black woman born in 1915 Arkansas. Your disordered hardcore punk rock was sanctioned by a kinky-haired Black girl born to two cotton pickers in the Jim Crow South. The electric guitar was first played in ways very few people could have ever imagined by a woman who wasn’t even allowed to play at music venues around the country. The Patron Saint of rock music is Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The original punk rebel from which we were all born, SRT is muva.[more inside]
Cold? Try some "Spice on Snow."
The Freight Hoppers: "Fort Smith Breakdown." Alex Kehler and Jeremiah McLane: "Le Pruneau" on accordion and nyckleharpa. Dana and Susan Robinson: "The Flying Farmer." Mike Merenda and Ruthy Unger: "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." Ida Mae Specker, Rachel Eddy and Brian Slattery: "Boil Them Cabbage Down" and "Big-Eyed Rabbit."
Young Pickers of Note, 2019 Edition
Bluegrass guitarists Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle jam out on the Townes Van Zandt classic "White Freightliner Blues." [more inside]
A song about a girl
Larkin Poe
Larkin Poe covers Spoonful, Teardrop, Hey Sinner/Black Betty, The Thrill Is Gone, Come On In My Kitchen, Preachin' Blues, One Way Out, No Particular Place To Go. [more inside]
Repairing Willie Nelson's Trigger
Since the mid-seventies, Mark Erlewine has been patching up Willie Nelson's guitar Trigger to keep it going for another year. Here he shows the sorts of things this entails: fixing a crack, cleaning and applying laquer. In part two he glues the top where it is separating from the body, restrings and gives it a test. Previously.
“That was live, 7. Not taped”
52 years ago today, the joint NASA mission of Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 marked a milestone: the first time that two orbiting objects successfully rendezvoused with one another in space. The Gemini 6 command pilot and Mercury Seven astronaut Wally Schirra (and onboard computers) brought the capsule within 1 foot of Gemini 7 and the two spaceships stayed in close orbit for four-and-a-half hours.
Shortly after their separation, they gleefully marked another milestone: the first song transmitted from space. [more inside]
I aint one of yall peers, I'm the sum of all fears
The Roots' Black Thought unleashes a blistering freestyle on Funkmaster Flex's show on Hot 97 (NSFW language) for 10 minutes straight, doing everything from flipping words to talking about his position on late night television, to referencing a multitude of rappers from Rakim, the D.O.C., Kanye and Dr. Dre, to Kendrick Lamar, to talking about his mother and his upbringing and the current crop of rappers.
In a crisis, play "Don't Stop Believin'"
The essence of joy and heartbreak
"He channeled the essence of joy and heartbreak into hook-laden three minute pop songs infused with a lifelong passion for rock & roll." Pat DiNizio, lead singer and songwriter of the Smithereens, has passed away at the age of 62. [more inside]
Tuned Up in the Spirit
Tuned Up in the Spirit: Lined out hymnody with the Old Regular Baptists "the oldest English-language religious-music oral tradition in North America, a tradition with roots stretching back to parish churches in England in the early 1600s and perhaps further still. Some people find it a strange sound. One researcher who went hunting for descriptions of lined-out singing from turn-of-the-century travelers in Appalachia told me that a few words kept popping up: mournful, wailing, confusion."
I’m drawing in the sand a line
a true piece of art is a window into the transcendent
Dissect is a musical podcast "created by Cole Cuchna, "one person, working in his spare time, in a garage in Sacramento." It is also a moving and illuminating deep look into the music and genius of Kanye West, via a deep dive into his album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Even if - Especially if you are a music fan who has found Kanye to be insufferable and unpleasant, it is worth your attention, because there is a good chance that the experience will be relevatory, and you might find yourself encountering some surprising moments of grace (at 26:20). [more inside]
Cyndi Lauper slays on the Appalachian Mountain dulcimer
My favorite thing discovered on the internet research rabbithole is how Cyndi Lauper is widely-regarded by Appalachian Mountain Dulcimer enthusiasts as one of the finest straight-up performers on the obscure instrument.Says @JMMcDermott. Proof: True Colors, Time after Time, Fearless.
I'm-a teach you how to make lasagna
If All I Was Was Black
"I have a mind to bury them whole,” Mavis Staples sings on her new album, If All I Was Was Black (YT playlist). It is not a very Mavis-like thing to hear the perpetually upbeat gospel legend sing. But after a lifetime devoted to fighting injustice through her music, such is the singer’s recent mood toward a renewed wave of bigotry and racial violence. Mavis Staples has had it. [more inside]
Gatherer and Fiddler: Alan Jabbour (1942–2017)
Alan Jabbour, who died today, was best known (to those who know of him at all) as a fiddler and a gatherer of fiddle tunes. His name and influence permeate American traditional music. If you like Old Crow Medicine Show, the Avett Brothers, Chris Thile, Carolina Chocolate Drops, SteelDrivers, etc., you are enjoying the results of Jabbour's life work. [more inside]
Blonde on Blonde turned 50 on Monday...
...the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her faceBlonde on Blonde turned 50 on Monday... [more inside]
Anywhere I go, I just haves a zeal.
Was it surprising that your music became popular again?Sam Chatmon - Make Me A Pallet On the Floor [more inside]
Well, no. Because everywhere I went, even when I was five and six years old, when I’d go to these clubs to play, the first thing they would say when I walked in the door, folks started to pattin’ and hollerin’, ''Let Sam have it! Let Sam have it!'' And I’d get that, man, and people - whoo! I’d put life all in there! And it’s the same thing right now. Anywhere I go, I just haves a zeal. I have a good zeal to play.
"He was a medical doctor, but he wrote songs."
Ben Bullington was a small-town doctor in Livingston, Montana, who wrote and recorded country/Americana music in his spare time. In November of 2012 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and decided to start crossing things off his bucket list. One of those things was doing a songwriting workshop in Nashville, and that brought him into the orbit of the great Darrell Scott. [more inside]
So long, Wolfman, so long
Today we bid a sad farewell to the last of the old-school Mississippi Hill Country bluesmen: Mr. Robert Belfour was a purveyor or that gritty, driving, riff-based, often one-chord Hill Country style pioneered by people like Mississippi Fred McDowell, and in more recent years popularized by artists like RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Let's take a listen, then, as we pay our respects to the "Wolfman", to some of his rocking, soulful blues. Here's Black Mattie, I Got My Eyes On You, Hill Stomp, Go Ahead On, My Baby's Gone, Done Got Old and You Got Me Crying. And here's an hour-long recording from February 2013, via NPR: Robert Belfour: Live In Concert.
Conversing with a musician's musician
Ry Cooder shares an hour of vignettes about skipping school in the '50s to teach himself guitar by listenting to hillbilly radio, how he came to work with Flaco Jiminez, being schooled by the old time Cuban musicians in the Buena Vista Social Club recording and more. Music journalist Barry Mazor draws him out about his 50-year career in a delightful and highly entertaining chat - an hour didn't seem nearly long enough.
There'll be a hell of a Mardi Gras in heaven next month
It's time to say so long to legendary Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Bo Dollis, who, for many years, led his Wild Magnolias through the streets of the Crescent City. Handa Wanda, Big Chief, Ho Na Nae and Jockomo Jockomo. Oops Upside Your Head [more inside]
The life I love is making music with my friends
All Roads Lead to [still-living country music legend*] Willie Nelson: "In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on." [more inside]
If I get killed, please don't bury my soul.
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie. No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on.
Love the True Detective theme? A brief intro to The Handsome Family
The Handsome Family are an alt-country and americana band based in Albuquerque via Chicago, Texas and Long Island. They have currently finding a new audience thanks to having their song Far From Any Road used as the theme from True Detective on HBO. [more inside]
American Deep Blues Touring 1960's Britain
The American Folk Blues Festival 1962 - 1966; Vol 2; Vol 3 - The festival was an annual event with dozens of classic blues greats like Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters & Howlin' Wolf playing to appreciative UK audiences. "Attendees at Manchester in 1962, the first ever venue for the festival in Britain, included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page. Subsequent attendees at the first London festivals are believed to have also included such influential musicians as Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton, and Steve Winwood. Collectively these were the primary movers in the blues explosion that would lead to the British Invasion." [more inside]
36 years in the making
Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos: Live "From this rich catalog, Cooder cherry-picked only a dozen songs to include on Live but they’re fairly representative of his eclectic oeuvre. His picks also feature plenty of his guitar playing, which will please fans who felt (as I sometimes did) that his recent albums were a bit stingy with his greatest asset. "
"The shows also were a family affair. The Corridos Famosos include Ry’s son Joachim on drums, Joachim’s wife Juliet Commagere on vocals, and her brother Robert Francis on bass, as well as an old friend and collaborator, Flaco Jimenez, the Tejano accordionist who was at Cooder’s side when he played this venue 34 years earlier. Terry Evans, another veteran of the 1977 shows, handles backup vocals, along with Arnold McCuller, filling in for Cooder’s other longtime singing partner Bobby King." Don't miss the clip at the end of the review. [more inside]
Maura O'Connell to Retire as Solo Act
“I’d say that my great days, they’re all done,” she said. “I figured out after the last record I did that I’m what is known as now, a legacy artist, which means basically, you’re on your own. . . . It’s been a long road, and it’s been a great road — I’ve been very lucky so much over my life. But at this stage I feel like I’m only going backwards.”[more inside]
A Little Old-Timey Song or Two
Let's take it back to the source
You might have heard at one time or another a 60s band called Canned Heat, who made a wee bit of a splash way back when with a little number called Going Up the Country. The song featured a simple but very catchy little flute riff between verses. If you ever wondered where that riff came from (not to mention the melodic contour of the tune itself) you need look no further than a 1928 recording by Henry Thomas, who played the flute melody on his quills, or, panpipes. The song was called Bull Doze Blues. [more inside]
I believe, I believe my time ain’t long...
Just you, the artist, and some new friends.
House concerts are becoming more popular across the country. In Cleveland, Mechanic Street House Concerts has been hosting six shows per year since 2009, most recently opening their doors to the Shivering Timbers with Tom Evanchuck.
Ry Cooder and the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces - Let's Have A Ball, a film by Les Blanks
Ry Cooder and the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces - Let's Have A Ball, a film by Les Blanks
This is the complete show from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz in March 1987. Via The Iwebender Channel
Love that Maria Elena.... [more inside]
This is the complete show from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz in March 1987. Via The Iwebender Channel
Love that Maria Elena.... [more inside]
Punch Brothers, Mandolin Brothers and Lloyd Loar
On Monday September 24th, Mandolin Brothers were visited by 3/5ths of The Punch Brothers: Chris Thile, along with Chris Eldridge and Noam Pickelny. Chris played their Lloyd Loar 1924 F-5 mandolin and their 1925 Fern. Among the numbers they played was a lovely rendition of Tennessee Waltz. Previously [more inside]
Mittenless man discovers hidden talent
Farmer plays a song with ‘hand-farts’ (1933). (SLvideo / SFW)
Ephemeral New York
Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.' [more inside]
There is a house in New Orleans
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God I know I'm one.
[more inside]
They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God I know I'm one.
[more inside]
the soul of American music, laid out, explained, delineated and personalized, brilliantly
Goddammit it, I wish I'd written this deliciously nail-on-the-head, brilliantly insightful and sweeping overview of American musico-cultural history, seasoned with heavy dollops of personal remembrances and observations that I identify with so much that it's almost scary. But alas, I didn't. Still, I'm really, really grateful that William Hogeland did: Coons! Freaks! Hillwilliams! : 200 Years of Roots-Rock Revival (a Memoir).
Roots and Branches of Americana
Ray Wylie Hubbard hosts Roots and Branches weekly live from Tavern In The Gruene for New Braunfels, Texas radio station KNBT 92.1 FM.
Two hours of music and interviews with established and up and coming Americana artists.