Category Archives: Americana

John Fogerty’s The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again To Be Released in September

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  • 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.
  • 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.

Music Review: Jamey Johnson – My Way To You

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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.

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No Guns in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge

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  • 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)

Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar Collaborate on Jack Kerouac Inspired Album

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  • Gothic-roots band Builders and the Butchers premier their first ever music video Golden and Green (and they used one of my favorite fonts, Bleeding Cowboy,  for the opener. Cool!) The song is great and the video is an odd mash-up of an early 20th century gang post-heist, the 1963 film Children of the Damned and Narnia. (Spinner)
  • Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile‘s third album, Give Up The Ghost, will be released on Columbia Records this fall.  The album is produced by Rick Rubin. Carlile has announced the dates for her Give Up The Ghost Traveling Show beginning September 10th at The Depot in Salt Lake City, UT.   The tour will make stops at legendary venues across the country including Chicago’s House of Blues, New York’s Beacon Theatre and The Wiltern in Los Angeles.
  • Ricky Skaggs  will honor the man who introduced him to bluegrass. On Sept. 15, Skaggs will release Ricky Skaggs Solo (Songs My Dad Loved) on his own Skaggs Family Records featuring 13 tunes he was introduced to by his father, Hobert Skaggs. (Billboard)
  • Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar are collaborating on an album inspired by legendary Beat writer Jack Kerouac. (Spinner)

A Cooperative Looks for Musicians to Take American Music Worldwide

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The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad is a partnership between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.It’s a programs that “is designed to foster cultural exchange with audiences worldwide through performance and educational outreach.”

Aside from jazz, urban/hip hop the cooperative is looking for “American roots music (including blues, bluegrass, Cajun, gospel, zydeco, and country).”

Seems to be a shame that applicants need to be “ensembles comprised of four musician” since it’d be a lot easier for a single performer to sling a guitar over their shoulder and tour the world than coordinating four people to do so.

Musicians must be at least 21 years of age, a U.S. citizen, and hold a valid U.S. passport.

Selected ensembles tour to such regions as Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East for approximately one month. International activities include public concerts, master classes, lectures, demonstrations, workshops, jam sessions, media outreach, and collaborations with local musicians.

The U.S. Department of State funds international travel, hotels, and meals, and awards a modest tour honorarium to each musician.

Complete program information is available at the JALC Web site.

The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad is a partnership between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program is designed to foster cultural exchange with audiences worldwide through performance and educational outreach.

Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss and Union Station to Play theWhite House

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  • Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss and Union Station to play Obama White House for next week’s White House Art & Innovation Events: Music Series Celebrating Country Music & Smithsonian’s National Design Awards Event.
  • The Washington Post takes a look at Nashville’s Bluegrass scene and follows the high lonesome from the Ryman Auditorium’s annual Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman to one of my personal favorite The Station Inn.
  • Juli Thanki over at the 9513.com reviews the new self-titled album by riot grrrl/roots group Those Darlins.
  • Decider Milwaukee sits down with Portland’s indy Americana band Blitzen Trapper.

Interviews with Jay Farrar and Twang Nation on Twitter/blip.fm

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  • The Phoenix New Times’ Martin Cizmar ponders if, while interviewing Son Volt front man Jay Farrar,  he should ask him about the new Wilco record? (he does.)
  • Annie Zaleski at the Riverfront Times also interviewed Farrar and got some details on his side project Gob Iron, and the connection between Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt’s new label, Rounder Records.
  • Speaking of Son Volt, Kentucky.com’s Walter Tunis is digging their new release American Central Dust.
  • Radney Foster’s 50th birthday bash is tonight at Hills Cafe in Austin at 6pm w/ Radney, Wade Bowen, and many more.
  • And in shameless self-promotional news- Join Twang Nation on Twitter and listen to music I dig up over at blip.fm.

Music Review – Rita Hosking – Come Sunrise (self released)

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come sunriseRita Hosking might call Davis, CA home (18 km / 11 mi West of Sacramento) but the geographical and cultural influences that shape her excellent new release, Come Sunrise, could plot here anywhere between a rural West Texas roadhouse or the front porch of an Appalachian cabin.

Recorded in Austin with producer, engineer and Robert Earl Keen guitarist, Rich Brotherton and featuring some of Austin’s best musicians – Lloyd Maines on Dobro, Glenn Fukunaga on upright bass, and Danny Barnes on banjo, Warren Hood on fiddle, Brotherton plys several instruments himself and Sean Feder from Hosking’s backing band Cousin Jack on percussion and harmony vocals.

With a vocal style somewhere between Natalie Merchant and Gillian Welch Hosking sings all 11 of her original songs with a delicacy that belies the force of her delivery. This is the kind of music I imagine a few generations ago would have easily landed on bestselling Hillbilly charts before some executive in the 40’s decided the term too degrading (and probably less market-friendly) and changed the name to Country & Western.

Now this music finds its home in the Americana genre, where skilled musicians like Hosking remind us that music that tells tales of people’s lives, with instrumentation and arrangement that also hearken from that heritage, is so wholly satisfying in a world more and more addicted to entranced and irony.

The slow burners are the real stand outs.  Simple pleasures yearn from the title track as Maines’ Dobro and Hood’s fiddle envelope you with the sonic equivalent of a down comforter, Montgomery Creek Blues is a dreamy pedal-steel laced tale of drunken revelry that ends in murder and Hiding Place (my hands-down favorite) is a sparkling ode to solitude that betrays a hint of menace from possible pursuer.

Precious Little, Little Joe and Holier Than Thou are straight up honky-tonkers that shoudl strike shame in the heart of every Music City big label suit.

With Come Sunrise Hosking gives us a prism that isolates the distinct historic threads of country and folk music and then combines it again
into a wholly satisfying and extraordinary body of work.

Official Site | MySpace | Facebook | Buy

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The New York Times on Those Darlins

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  • The New York Times posts a great review of the riot grrrl-trad country group Those Darlins show at the lower East-Side’s Mercury Lounge.
  • Willie Nelson’s Facebook page is posting hints where this year’s Farm Aid will be held. So far we have:  The city for this year’s concert has a professional sports team named after an animal,  the concert will be in a state that is in the top 12 for number of farms  and it will be in a city & state where Farm Aid where Farm Aid has never been held.
  • Speaking of the Texas Yoda – Head over to Texas Music Matter to listen to Amazing Grace: The Willie Nelson Story – a winner of two National Headliners Awards including this year’s Grand Prize for Radio. Nearly a year in the making, the program features rare music plus interviews with, among others, Kris Kristofferson, Norah Jones, John Mellencamp, Ray Price, biographer Joe Nick Patoski, Willie’s best friend and closest confidante (his sister, Bobbie), and the Yoda  himself.
  • Country music legend (and daughter of country music legend Mel Tillis) Pam Tillis talks to the Vancouver Sun about the state of country music.

Lyle Lovett and Guy Clark Prepare New Releases

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  • Lyle Lovett will combine both originals and songs “by some of my favorite Texas singer-songwriters” on his next album, which is due out Oct. 20. (Billboard)
  • And in more Texas legends news; Guy Clark’s new album, Sometimes the Song Writes You, will drop on Sept. 22 on Dualtone Music Group. Clark collaborats with Shawn Camp, Rodney Crowell, Joe Leathers, and more on the album . He also follows Steve Earle’s recent release and covers If I Needed You, written by his late friend, Townes Van Zandt. (CMT)