• Willie Nelson premiered his new video covering Tom T. Hall’s Shoeshine Man (below) The song is not on his upcoming covers album American Classics so I have no idea whay he made this video, but he seems to be having a ball. The Texas Yoda has taken a page from the DIY codger goofing around in front of a video camera recently used by Neil Young for his video Fork in the Road.

• The Americana Music Association announced the lineup for its 2009 festival,  Sept. 16-19 at around several of  Nashville’s best venues – The Mercy Lounge, The Cannery Ballroom, 3rd & Lindsley, The Station Inn and The Basement.  On the roster is Cross Canadian Ragweed, Angela Easterling, Asleep at the Wheel, The Bottle Rockets, Jim Lauderdale, Buddy Miller, Joe Pug, Charlie Robison, Marty Stuart, Patrick Sweany, Those Darlins and many more.

• Popmatters.com has posted an mp3 for Chain, a cut off Vic Chesnutt’s upcoming release At the Cut (Constellation) to be released 22 September (US)

• Randy Travis, Martina McBride and Ray Price join an International  line-up of over 60 International, UK and Irish acts performing on three separate stages at the UTV CountryFest ’09  August 1st – 2nd  at the Kings Hall in Belfast.

Gretchen Wilson and Sony Nashville  part ways partly due to missing the mark set by her gazillion selling 2004 debut, Redneck Woman. Wilson is talking about starting her own label. Wilson joins Tim McGraw and Hank Williams Jr. in displaying her  dissatisfaction with the Music City Big Label system as being too stifling and smothering creativity.

Of all the dead-brained schlocky muzak coming out of Nashville over the last couple of decades I actually think Wilson offered glimpses of  something raw and great if given the right material. I hope she now has the freedom to choose or write better songs.

• Kris Kristofferson and producer discusses Kristofferson’s upcoming Closer to the Bone (Sept. 29 on New West Records) and how they were trying to capture the intimacy that defined his last release This Old Road. Closer to the Bone will contain the song Good Morning John which comes from a letter Kristofferson wrote to Johnny Cash for a sobriety party. Kristofferson will perform on Nov. 1 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and on Nov. 10 he’ll receive the BMI Icon Award during the BMI Country Awards in Nashville. (billboard.com.)

• The New York Press has a great feature on Twang Nation favorite The Builders and The Butchers.

• Malcolm Holcombe’s will release For the Mission Baby in the U.S. on September 29, 2009, and in the UK/Europe on October 5, 2009. The album was recorded in May ’09, produced, recorded and mixed by Ray Kennedy at Room and Board Studios in Nashville, TN.

• The fine folks over at the 9513.com continue their Forgotten Artists series with Forgotten Artists – The 1980s.

• In my ongoing quest to make San Francisco a hotbed of Americana/roots music I recently came across Rhubarb Whiskey. The band features Cindy Emchy on accordion and vocals and Boylamayka on dog-house bass,  guitar and mandolin and background vocals and are a blend of vaudeville, gypsy jazz and Southern-Gothic. Check ‘em out. (Main Site | MySpace)

• Although it’s over a year old there is a great article (Facing the Music) on the seismic changes in the music industry through the lens of Music City and some of the unique ways some people are planning for the future instead of wringing their hands or suing their fans. The article was by Donnie Snow for businesstn.com

• John “Marmaduke” Dawson, a longtime Grateful Dead collaborator who co-wrote “Friend of the Devil” and who, along with Jerry Garcia, developed a devoted following with his psychedelic country group New Riders of the Purple Sage, has died at the age of 64 from stomach cancer. (via the 9513 and Spinner.com)

• Paste Magazine spends some time with Americana Music Association executive director Jed Hilly. Jed discusses the growing influence of the genre, the Recording Academy adding an Americana Album of the Year Grammy for 2010 and that you need not be an American to play Americana. As a member of the AMA I’m glade to see some cred coming.

Add to the Twitter hashtag trends of  #followfriday and #musicmonday one that I can really get behind – #twangthursday.

#twangthursday follows these earlier trends of assigning each day of the week a adjective that makes it easy for other twitter users to find and add to a specific discussion. From what I can gather about the newly christened #twangthursday it’s about country, Americana and roots music.

I, like most people, didn’t initially see the value of Twitter. But like a newsreader that initially has nothing in it Twitter only as good as the streams of content you fill it with. If you are a fan of Mexican food cooking and you follow other fans, chefs and magazines that cater to that then what you have is a valuable and constantly updated resource. If all you follow is your friends, well, I hope you have very interesting friends.

So get out there people and let your #twangthursday fly!!

Though Jason and the Punknecks aare described by some as punk-country. Gratuitous tattoos and a stage show that gets a bit rowdy the band has more in common with Bill Monroe than the Sex Pistols (though, as I’ve argued before I think the Sex Pistols have more in common with Monroe that 95% of what comes out on Music City.)

This band sounds to like they adhere to tradition without being enslaved by it and tap joyously into the rowdy and hell raising spirit that has been part of road houses and honk- tonks for decades.

The  husband and wife duo of  Jason and Polly Punkneck make the kind of music fit for Carter and Cash, and sure they work their corn-pone shtick a little thick, but there’s no denying the music. They adhere to a sound (and work ethic) as old as the hills and plains and a revel in a hillbilly attitude that Nashville has spent years trying to varnish over.

It’s one thing to be Shooter Jennings or Justin Townes Earle, but being the Granddaughter of country music legend Hank Williams and the Daughter of the hard-living, hell raising outlaw and legend of sorts Hank Williams Jr., well that’s a whole other mountain to climb.

Like her half-brother Hank Williams III, Holly Williams takes the fundamentals laid down by her ancestors and burns her own brand on the work. Here With Me is much more a country record than her previous release for Universal South The Ones We Never Knew and perhaps the turn in style was a result of the automobile accident that nearly took the lives of her and her sister Hilary. Maybe, like Hank III, the primary motive for moving into the family business was the promise of a ready audience and cash.

Whatever the motive this is a great release that brings to mind the work of another blood kin of country music royalty, Rosanne Cash. Like Cash, Williams does great things with a modest vocal range and brings a sophistication to the songs (many of which she wrote) without completely smothering out the rustic charm with glossy productions and lazy paint by the numbers fluff reaching for a top charting radio hit.

Holly Williams is every bit the outlaw her destiny assumes she’ll be, she just prefers a level of uptown refinement to her country pedigree.

Official Site | MySpace | Buy

• John Fogerty will release his new album The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again (Rides? Shouldn’t it be “Ride?”) a  collection of covers and originals this September 1st. The release will feature new takes on classic Country and Americana tunes originally written by or for Ray Price, Buck Owens, the Everly Brothers and John Prine. The album is Fogerty’s a 36 year conceptual follow-up to 1973′s Blue Ridge Rangers, a post-Creedence solo release of gospel and country covers. That album had him playing all instruments but on this new release he has a powerhouse backing him – including Kenny Arnoff, Herb Pederson, Jodie Kenny,  Buddy Miller and more.

• Paste Magazine’s Band of the week is a Twang Nation favorite – Portland-based  The Builders And The Butchers.

• The Americana Music Association has announced that mandolin master Sam Bush will receive the Lifetime Achievement for Instrumentalist award at the 8th Annual Americana Honors & Awards ceremony scheduled for Thurs., Sept. 17 at the historic Ryman Auditorium.

I don’t usually review singles on this blog. I think any craftsman worth their salt releases a whole body of work and it should be heard as such. I don’t give a shit about the charts or the downloadable single mentality. I prefer to tackle the whole of a work because I think it’s most fair to someone that has poured blood, sweat and tears into 10 or more songs. I prefer to focus my attention on good music and good music is never produced to be sliced out like bologna.

But here I go reviewing a single. This is because Jamey Johnson is no typical artists and his damn full length isn’t out until Fall and his newly release single, My Way To You, is all I have to tide me over until then.

The song begins like many of the songs on Johnson’s excellent previous effort  (and now certified Gold) – That Lonesome Song. A far off chill of pedal steel cries out and is met with an acoustic guitar. High-living, hell-raising and regret. Living on the edge and living to come back to set it all to music. The story Johnson tells, with his eerily Waylon-like baritone, is a country music chestnut most eloquently told by Johnson himself on his last release’s’ High Cost Of Living (penned by Johnson and James Slater)

Sure Johnson is repeating himself from that song, but it’s a sin many have committed and he does it so damn well he gets a pass. Where the song breaks down for me is when this lonesome confessional rocks out. Yes, I said rocks out.  First there is the piano that seems a bit tickly for the subject matter. Then the drums thunder in as if it were a Springsteen epic. Then the electric guitar squeals in like it was some Poison rock ballad. It’s just too much all over the place and way off target.

Johnson still brings the goods and this song is still better than 99.99% of what’s on mainstream country radio. But I’m using his own benchmark album as a measure here.  And though the song is a familiar theme and works deftly in his able hands, the arrangement detracts from him and it’s tone of  solemn redemption.

Look I know a case can be made that the big “BOOMING” ending is the cathartic part of his rising like A pheonix from his sordid past and blah blah blah… I’,m not buying it and I just hope when the proper release is dropped all the bombastic fat is stripped out and Johnson is allowed to be the raw talent that has made him part of the new wave of Outlaw heroes.

• The debut single from Jamey Johnson’s forthcoming album is entitled “My Way will be available as a free download at www.jameyjohnson.com on August 3rd. On August 11, the digital e-single will be available for download at iTunes.

• If you read this blog regularly then you know I’m a fan of 94-7 Badlands FM serving Americana and Red Dirt Music to the  Corpus Christi and coastal area of Texas (and streaming online!), but I have to say I am partial to Gina Gonzalez on Mid Days from 10am to 3pm. The girl plays some nice tunes!

• Legendary Nashville Lower Broadway honky-tonk, and unofficial Ryman Auditorium green room, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge has laid down the law on packing heat in the bar. Tennessee has taken the genius move to allow firearms in bars so Tootsies had to take steps to keep the heeled from gaining entrance.  Frisking patrons and scanning with metal-detecting wands will now be part of entering the establishment. (CMT.com)