Engine 145 - A Roots Music Publication

That the Darius Rucker version of “Wagon Wheel” reached Number One on country radio this month is something that should not go unexplored on the roots watch. How the song came to be there can tell us as much, and maybe more, about the practical interaction of roots music and pop, of blues and country, [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Borrowing, Creating, and the “Wagon Wheel” Saga"

A look at some new books, albums and a broadcast that look at where we’ve been to show us where we are: Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches and Encounters, edited by Jeff Burger. Those of us who interview and profile performers for articles concerning what they do sometimes get, and occasionally deserve, credit for pulling [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Spring Words and Music — History Worth Catching, Part 2"

The impossible to miss excitement this spring, within country music and in the wider pop music world, too, around the strong, risk-taking, breath-of-fresh-air releases from Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe raises anew some longstanding questions about the relative effects on music makers of being relatively unnoticed. Okay; neither of them were in fact music business [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Brave, Specific Country Women and Timid, Generic Men?"

I’ve been traveling through the intersection of Roots and Pop for, well, a long time now, but the artists who speed right through the yellow and red lights have never stopped grabbing my attention.  Are they doing that on purpose? By accident? Unaware there’s an intersection–even if it’s a backed-up, jammed up intersection? Or maybe [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Pop Artists Driving Close to Country"

Engine 145.com is an American roots music blog, and for all of our regular emphasis on country, Americana, bluegrass and occasional roots rock, it’s impossible to cover this arena without bringing up the blues. Without blues, all of those genres would have developed along a whole lot more one-note and delicate lines, if they’d been [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: The Not-Boring Blues"

Back a lifetime or two ago when I was an undergraduate at George Washington University in DC, I was a regular deejay on the campus radio station, with a show called “Heartbreak Hotel” that featured  roots rock, country music and what would have been called “Americana” if there’d been a term for it; this was [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Nashville’s Eddie; Nashville’s Jack"

Year’s end is all at once “make a list” time, “last chance to bring it up” time and “turn the page” time, so I thought I’d keep all of that in mind this column and point you towards some recent roots and country releases, reissues and re-visits in particular, that strike me as worthy of [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Looking Forward, Looking Back"

The power of music (and the secondary power of repeatedly talking and teaching a particular narrative about it), are such that for many, the Dust Bowl, some eighty years later, survives in memory mainly or solely as “the horrible experience Woody Guthrie sang about.” (For others, it’s what they saw or read in The Grapes [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: There’s More “Dust Bowl Music” Than Woody’s"

I’m sometimes asked —sympathetically or suspiciously—why I don’t write more negative reviews than I do. It’s not some physical disability that prevents me from turning my thumb down; there are simply so many projects (all media included) being released now, more than I could ever discuss, and life’s too short to spend much time or [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Fall Words and Music; History Worth Catching"

September’s the month country and its cousins honor music and music makers that the Media Barons-That-Be don’t consider ripe for prime time—anything more than five minutes old, anything with specialized appeal, artists who don’t universally look like aspiring starlets or teen idols (sorry, Junior Sisk, Richard Thompson, and Billy Sherrill) and anybody at all besides [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: The Ryman Awards Show Season"