Caleb’s name deserves equal billing beside the other top shelf independent roots artists from across the country. And though you may have not heard of Caleb until recently, or just right now, the 40-year-old with flecks of gray hair sticking out from under his trucker hat has been touring and making music for 20 years now. It just has not always been music that bears his name.
Here at Saving Country Music, we have put ourselves squarely on the front lines of opposing the infiltration of hip hop into the country genre, or possibly, the takeover of country by hip-hop, that seems to be pervading the current mainstream country music landscape. Unlike many others that flee from this fight, I am willing to take the charges of racism and closed-mindedness…
I’m not sure many other artists, even the ones that are big Johnny Cash fans, would be up for pulling this project off with this adeptness. It would almost take a small team of musical historians, creative writers, and musicians to evoke what Dale Watson does in a seemingly effortless manner simply from his fandom, understanding, and deep appreciation for The Man in Black.
Now that mainstream country music has been seen as just another version of pop music by so many people for so long, my concern is that talented musicians are being turned off by the mere mention of the term ‘country’, seeing it as a genre without gravitas, obsessed with money and image, making it even more likely for the one-in-a-million music talent to stay away.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember Hank Williams ever recording any drunken sea shantys. I can’t remember any Ol’ Hank songs featuring trumpets, or classically-styled lilting mandolin parts either. And I guess the Hank song that is built around incongruent, sloppily-overdubbed harmonies is on that $70 box set I could never get the scratch to buy.
Listen to me and listen good. This new Boomswagglers lineup, with Steven Bracamontez on guitar, and Natalie McDougall on drums has it. And when I say ‘it’, I’m not just saying it’s good, I mean it has that undefinable thing that when you watch it live, it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, the kind of ‘it’ that overrides appeal based simply on taste.
When it comes to one man bands, Scott H. Biram is the franchise. He is the top of the heap, the one that inspired so many others. He’s tussled with semi trucks and spilled his guts out on the highway just like he’s spilled his guts out on countless stages all across the Western world until he earned that glorious ‘H’ in the middle of his name.
When I saw a new Ryan Adams album was coming down the pike, I honestly didn’t know what to think. I’ve been so hot and cold on the guy over the years as he shape shifts from the whims of identity crises and style changes, it’s harder to form a solid opinion about him than it is to conjure up a firm stool after 6 weeks in interior Mexico.
Since the beginning of Saving Country Music over 3 1/2 years ago, nothing but respect has been shown to The Country Music Hall of Fame. It is the last major country music institution that considers the preservation and promotion of the traditions and history of country music above commercial concerns, as other institutions bend and sway with the current popular trends in country music.
So many bands try to imbibe their music with a vintage feel and Western space by using copious amounts of chorus or reverb. Guitar player, singer, and songwriter Ryan Eastlyn takes the road less traveled with the use of moaning, melodic chorus lines that are so excellent, they vault this band from a relative unknown to one responsible for one of the better albums put out so far in 2011.
So I guess the founder of Apple Steve Jobs died or something? I don’t know. But it reminded me of a very strange but interesting piece of Hank3 T-shirt art that he debuted sometime in 2009, an all black shirt that simply showed the well-recognized Apple symbol with the bite out of the right side, an equals sign, and then a pentagram.
On February 13, 2002, Waylon Jennings, one of the great country music Outlaws, passed away due to complications from diabetes. Now a Phoenix-based organization along with the Waylon Jennings Estate, have partnered to set up The Waylon Fund to support state-of-the-art investigations into the genetic and genomic origins of diabetes.
With Working in Tennessee, Merle Haggard adds yet another solid volume to his already legendary arsenal of albums. Mainstream radio’s love affair with Merle may be over, but it doesn’t mean the fountain isn’t still flowing. When that vintage voice comes cracking out of that sideways cowboy smile, it still hits you like a precious memory.
It usually takes 6-9 months for the bloated machine of Music Row to realize and catch up on trends, but no doubt that within the next few months, we will begin to see more and more hip-hop infiltration into mainstream country. The next question will be, will the one artist that sits at the very top of the totem pole decide to lead ahead of that trend, or follow it?
That’s the real problem, not Jr.’s statements or ESPN’s whiplash decision, it is the fact that mass pop media is perpetually letting us all down, and giving in to the least common denominator. Hank should be happy. His career had been reduced to a weekly punch line. And ESPN should be happy they’re lighter a 200-pound blowhard who hasn’t had anything substantive to offer for 20 years.
Simply put, John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain is one of my top 10 albums of all time. The key to Aereo-Plain was preserving the visceral elements of bluegrass, the tie to the roots and the mastery of instrumentation, while combining it with the depth of folk-inspired songwriting, intelligent humor, and then adding an enlightened sense of tempo and chord progressions.
The fire quickly spread out of control, with residents forced to evacuate with little or no time to grab personal effects. The whole area between Austin and Bastrop became like a war zone. Lucky Tubb was . . . well . . . Lucky, and his home was not effected. However his brother and road manager Brian Kelly was.
Ahead of the release of their new album Damaged Goods, Reno, NV’s Hellbound Glory has released a new song from it called “You Better Hope You Die Young”. The song can be heard in it’s entirety here. Damaged Goods will be out November 15th on Rusty Knuckles, and 500 copies will also be available in a limited-edition vinyl LP with a digital download card.
Less than a week away from the release of one of the most controversial projects in country music in years, The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, the man Sony ATV put in charge of the project is dealing with plagiarism claims for some paintings in his “Asia Series” on display right now at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
This is music to get you moving. I can’t listen to this album at home. I’ll get flying around and break things. I can only listen while driving, with a foot pumping on the gas pedal to the groove. If somebody was listening to this album and wasn’t at least bobbing their head or tapping their foot, the next thing I’d do is put a mirror in front if their mouth.
Pop country group Rascal Flatts, the top-selling country group of the last decade, best known for their pallid and catchy tunes, prickly hair, and overt use of the pitch-correcting program Auto-tune in both the recorded and live formats, is now a member of the most sacred of all country music institutions, The Grand Ole Opry.
Next Tuesday, the ‘Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams’ will be released to the public. Completely putting aside the ethics questions for the project itself, I have drafted a list of 10 simple questions about the specifics of the Lost Notebooks that I think country music consumers have a right to be answered before they decide to purchase it.
Dale Watson has a brand new album coming out on October 11th, and like the name implies, it was recorded in the historic Sun Studios. Dale pairs up with drummer Mike Bernal and Chris Crepps on upright bass to imbibe his 14 original tracks with the classic Johnny Cash vibe that was originally captured at Sun in the mid-1950’s by Johnny and his “Tennessee Two”.
Country and folk music have a long history of joining forces to create infrastructure to help support music, principally in festival gatherings. And as the corporate music world continues to crumble and is able to support fewer artists, while capital and infrastructure to develop upcoming acts continues to contract, hip-hop and indie rock bands have been flocking to traditional roots festivals for support.
