On August 15th, the plans for the upcoming Outlaw Country Music Hall of Fame and an accompanying Outlaw Music Association were made public. The announcement stimulated a lot of speculation about what direction the upcoming Hall of Fame would take, but not many serious answers. So Saving Country Music reached out to Gary “Sarge” Sargeant, the spearhead of the Outlaw Country Hall of Fame.
High Cotton: A Tribute To Alabama gets right what so many cover and tribute albums get wrong, including its 2013 counterpart Alabama & Friends. A good tribute album doesn’t just pay tribute to the band or artist. It should be a 50/50 proposition, with the contributing artists also benefiting from the name recognition the tributee affords.
No ladies and gentlemen, Western Swing is not dead; not when Davy Jay Sparrow is on the job, doing his level best to keep the distinguished country music sub-genre fresh and fun by forging ahead with his fast-paced and frolicking take on one of country music’s original modes. Sparrow has migrated west from Indiana to Portland, OR and traded in his “Well Known Famous Drovers” for a gaggle of “Western Songbirds”.
The underground country movement initially formed around the mid 90’s not because somebody launched a website or a record label. It wasn’t because of a festival or because someone came up with a special name for a new genre. It came from the songs artists were writing, recording, and performing; songs that spoke very deep to the hearts of hungry listeners.
Crazy Lonesome Blue comes at you with no frills, offering up a bevy of original songs, a few covers and traditionals, and an all-star cast comprising the Nightlifer’s lineup. It’d take a DNA test to convince me that Danny Kay isn’t a cousin of Lucky Tubb in the way his lonesome drawl with a rounded cadence really pulls the emotion out of the words to a song while pulling the listener’s ear right in.
Will Hoge’s latest release is a song called “Strong,” and like so many of Will’s compositions, it demonstrates heart, depth, soul, and taste. There’s a lot of emotion in this song. It’s weighty. But just like Bob Seger’s “Like A Rock,” and John Mellencamp’s “Our Country,” it has been tapped to become the official song of the Chevy Silverado—destined to be played half a dozen times during every single football game.
With a gift for poetry like Townes Van Zandt, and a penchant for the whimsical, progressive approach to bluegrass akin to John Hartford, Robbie Fulks releases a stunningly entertaining, brilliantly-balanced, deep, yet instantly-engaging comeback album called Gone Away Backward through longtime associates Bloodshot Records.
The dream of most every musician who has severed all ties to the civilian day job world and made that scarey plunge of becoming a professional artist is to eventually be discovered by someone who can help them make their dream into at least a stable, sustainable reality. The fairy-tale story of some unsigned, but unquestionably deserving artist getting discovered at a random show rarely comes true, but it did for Austin Lucas.
Good music is entertaining. Great music changes lives. And on the front lines of life altering music experiences are the one man bands. Courageous, pioneering, persevering through obscurity and misunderstanding, one man bands might make up a majority of the music world’s boldness and creativity per capita. Here’s 16 of them from a wide swath of the roots world.
Sex has been used to sell music almost since music became a commercial enterprise. From the shaking of Elvis’s hips, to Madonna’s “Sex” book, to Miley Cyrus doing all manner of gratuitous things with a foam finger. but in truth there’s plenty of positive female role models. From huge, internationally-known pop stars, to promising up-and-coming artists, positive female role models in music are out there.
There’s nothing I value more than a mainstream country music record that bucks all trends and is truly worth your ear. Enter Charlie Worsham and his debut album Rubberband that is being lauded by many critics and fans alike as a breath of fresh air for the mainstream radio dial. Rubberband is a very fun album that sucks you right in, but Charlie Worsham is no Kellie Pickler….
Larry & His Flask is an interesting music specimen. The biggest advice I could give to an underground roots band right now would be, “Get away from underground roots if you want to grow,” and Larry & His Flask’s success is the perfect example why. Their 2011 stint on the Warped Tour and taking the time to do things right on the business side….
I actually come from the camp that believes that if Mumford & Sons weren’t so popular, more core roots fans would respect them. But it is really hip to hate and undervalue Mumford right now. Let’s hope that the current backlash doesn’t hurt every band with a banjo, because there’s many great string bands out there that and mix high energy and heartfelt songs into the string band concept.
I know very little about Valerie June, and aspire to keep it that way. A natural mystery swirls around this woman similarly to the tresses emanating from her topside like a living, organic crown. Valerie June seems more apparition than woman—vanishing and appearing in the most random moments like a mythical character born in the mind of an early European troubadour….
Once again a member of the Texas music scene has delivered a song that gives voice and reason to how the rest of us feel. Wade Bowen’s “Trucks” aims its big, diamond-plated bumper at the incessant references to tailgates and four wheel drives in modern pop country songs and slams on the gas.
“Shakespeare Was A Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies” was made in 2005 to document Jack’s life, and the wild environment swirling around his legendary home studio, the “Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa.” It is about capturing the spirit of the man—the whimsy that he approached the creative process with.
by all accounts, The Civil Wars latest, self-titled album will be the duo’s swan song. Certain undisclosed, but publicly acknowledged irreconcilable differences have officially split the project in two, and almost kept this album from seeing the light of day altogether. But there’s still this business of 12 new tracks that they’ve released into a world.
We’ve been saying it all year—right now it is women taking the leadership role in trying help to save country music. But they’re not the only ones, and if you wanted to look for another significant segment of artists doing more help than harm to the genre, there’s no better place to look than north of the border. Here are six Canadian showing the type of creative leadership country music needs.
Welcome to Saving Country Music’s 2013 Pickathon LIVE blog! We will out at Pickathon all weekend, leaving our thoughts, posting pics, and other bits of information from the fest all weekend. Below you can watch a LIVE stream from the festival’s primary stages, but at any given time, multiple performances might be going on, so check below that in the live blog section for other activities transpiring at Pickathon.
After a six year wait to release an album of original material at the mercy of Curb Records’ career-shattering and sometimes illegal talent retention program, prolonging the release process for artists on their final album with the label nearly indefinitely, the embattled and bruised LeAnn Rimes has finally released “Spitfire.” The chatter around “Spitfire” has been polarizing to darn near bellicose.
JJ Cale passed away yesterday evening (7-26-13) from a heart attack. He was 74. His influence on music was great. His influence on country music was unfairly unheralded and understated, but important nonetheless. the first established country artist to really do country funk right was Waylon Jennings in 1974 with the song “Louisiana Women” by JJ Cale.
Like the tone of Willie Nelson’s guitar or Johnny Cash’s voice, a Guy Clark song has become an ineffaceable institution of American music. Even if you’re only familiar with his songs though the performances of others, or songs he’s influenced by others, Guy Clark’s handiwork is embedded in the very ethos of what we know as songwriting in American music, even if that influence is imperceptible to the average listener.
“Take It And Break It” affords nine new original tracks from Rondeau, and is produced by R.S. Field who has previously worked with folks like Billy Joe Shaver and Hayes Carll, and produced Justin Townes Earle’s first two LP’s. This album has a great spirit and is a worthy receptacle for these original songs that now get to go out into the world and find inviting hearts.
You may have been a little shocked to read the above title in reference to the wild-assed, ribald-laced, gonzo front man of the legendary West Coast punk rock band The Supersuckers, but die hard fans of Eddie Spaghetti don’t need to be sold on the idea that when Eddie wants to wipe the smirk off of his face, he can pen (or sing) a pretty heartfelt composition.