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Roots Watch: Pop Artists Driving Close to Country
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 [...]
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Hayes Carll, SteelDrivers Debut New Music; Big Machine to Release Nashville Soundtrack; Della Mae Plays Pakistan
Ronnie Fauss is among the initial lineup of artists who’ll play SXSW next year. Bob French, Sr., leader of the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, passed away on Monday at the age of 74. Listen to “Love Don’t Let Me Down,” a new Hayes Carll song featuring Caitlin Rose. Check out “I’ll Be There” from The SteelDrivers’ [...]
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Friday Five: Cola
Nectar of the Gods. That’s what a friend of mine and I call the sweet goodness that is known as Coca-Cola. It hits the spot for millions of patrons a day in more than 200 different countries. That’s not too bad for something that was intended as a patent medicine when it was invented by [...]
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Friday Five: The Ed Sullivan Show
On this date in 1901, a young boy was born in New York who would go on to change modern media as we know it. At the age of 47, Ed Sullivan would take the still-relatively-new media of television and start the variety show called simply, Toast of the Town. (It would eventually be renamed [...]
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Roots Watch: Country Icons and Family Legacies
Working as I do in both journalism and music history, from time to time I’ve had the opportunity (and also the working need, truthfully) to interview the immediate families of some of country and roots music’s most celebrated figures, sometimes getting to know them outside of that defined situation. It occurs to me again and [...]
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Sunny Sweeney Releases Holiday Single; Farce the Music Offers Benefit Compilation; Dobie Gray and Barbara Orbison Pass Away
Dobie Gray passed away yesterday at the age of 71. Barbara Orbison, widow of Roy Orbison, also passed away yesterday (the 23rd anniversary of Roy’s death). She was 60 years old. Gretchen Peters has a new blog entry up about the song “Camille,” written with Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss. “Camille” will be on Peters’ [...]
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Dierks Covers Pink Floyd; Drew Kennedy to Release Album with Companion Novel; New Music Videos
People Magazine has a brand new country music edition on newsstands featuring Lady Antebellum. To celebrate the new edition, they’re giving away a free download featuring some big hitters including: Ronnie Dunn, Vince Gill, Billy Currington, Jake Owen, Terri Clark, Matraca Berg, JT Hodges, Bradley Gaskin, and Sonia Leigh. Drew Kennedy has a cool and [...]
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Keeping Up with the Cherryholmeses; Blake Shelton is Footloose; New Album Releases
Wonder what those Cherryholmes kids are up to now that the family band is no longer together? BJ is now the fulltime fiddler for Dailey & Vincent, Cia has formed a roots duo with Stetson Adkisson (they’ve got an EP due out later this year), Skip’s got the Skip Cherryholmes Quintet, and Molly Kate (now [...]
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Friday Five: Pop Covers
Several The 9513 commenters have stated that much of today’s mainstream country music sounds like pop music from the 1970s and 80s. Today we’ll be looking at a handful of artists who’ve semi-recently covered pop hits of that era. Are these versions better or worse than the originals? That’s up to you. 5. “When Doves [...]
Current Discussion
- BRUCE: Who the hell is "Pay Price"? Good grief.
- Luckyoldsun: Can't say I personally want to hear anything he's done since before the Watergate break-in--save for that duet album with ...
- Bruce: I can't access it for some reason. But I will tell you this. At 79 years of age, his voice ...
- Janice Brooks: I have the Jim Ed Brown single in rotation.
- Bruce: "People are more interesting than genres". Exactly!
- Jon: Imprecision or ambiguity might gentler terms than sloppiness, but yep, whatever you call it, there's a lot of it in ...
- Jon: "I seriously doubt that the statement “I think X” can reasonably be deemed to imply “I can’t conceive of anything ...
- Barry Mazor: Here's the current Americana chart. There are just a few--Emmylou, Rodney, Mr. Earle, Kris, Bobby Bare--who'd ever been on ...
- Barry Mazor: I think the history of radio formats is a lot sloppier than people like to make out, and here are ...
- Andrew: As the music director of a station that does play those classics right alongside the current top 40, I know ...
