• From cbs4denver.com - Denver’s Railbenders will stand out at the Mile High Music Festival as the only country/rock band featured on the bill with Spoon, Josh Ritter, Dave Mathews and Tom Petty.

• The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will feature music from their 42 year career to Austin’s Riverside Arena stage at 9:15 p.m. Friday, July 18. D.C. Drifters & Friends opens the show.

• The San Jose Mecury News has a nice piece on David Andersen who plays his 15-year-old Epiphone and greets tourists from around the world in the atrium of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Earl Scruggs said of Andersen “I love your pickin,’ son.”

• Nashville Skyline’s always excellent Chet Flippo has good things to say about  Randy Travis’ upcoming release “Around the Bend (July 15)

• For all you with laptop country music asperations Beta Monkey Music has released “Pure Country I: Rocking Nashville” a new set of drum loops targeted to Country music musicians. The loops come in many formats, including Apple Loops, which are compatible with GarageBand and Logic. Just bring a real drummer when you hit the road, folks.

• There still seems to be some confusion why Tim McGraw dragged Marcus Nirschl 30, a union glazer from Kent, Wash. on stage at a Washington State performance and then had him thrown out of the show. There have been allegations the man assaulted a woman who was in one of the front rows but the YouTube video of the incident is inconclusive (Q: Does McGraw allways look so bored while on stage as he does in this clip?). The ejected fan says he’s still a fan of McGraw. “I still like the guy,” Nirschl said. “The music’s still great. I just don’t know why he wanted to punch me.”

• Our thoughts go out to Elizabeth Cook on the passing of her mother. Cook has used her MySpace Blog to share her feelings uduring these rough times.

• Dallasnews.com has a nice write up on the grand dame of Country Music, Loretta Lynn’s sold out show last Saturday at Ft. Worth’s Bass Hall. The night before Lo-retty had played Stubb’s in Austin’s (latter part via the 9513)

• The New York Times covered the Alison Krauss and Robert Plant show at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. I was at this fantastic show and my review is forthcoming (I swear! Really!)

• Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Dana Jennings’ book about country music and his hard scrabble upbringing in rural New Hampshire “Sing Me Home.” I have read this excellent book and my review is forthcoming (I swear! Really!)

• Stephen M. Deusner at Pitchfork.com uses Miranda Lambert’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” release as a jumping off point to other great country albums over the last few years that “demand to be heard with the same open-mindedness and enthusiasm as Lambert.”

• Barnes&Noble.com has posted a video of “One on One with Emmylou Harris”, recorded live at their Union Square store in New York. Emmylou talks about her new release “All I Intended To Be” and performs her songs off the album “Gold,” “Not Enough,” written about her dog Bonaparte after he dies, and “How She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower” which was written after seeing a PBS documentary on the Carter Family. She also tells a great story about how her babysitter was the conduit for her and Gram Parsons to meet.
  

• Willie Nelson and Carl Cornelius are ready to take the wrapping off the new 30,000-square foot renovation off of the renovation of Carl’s Corner truck stop, the one with the old Tango nightclub giant musician frogs on the roof.
  The new space is now christened “Willie’s Place,” and will includes a honky tonk, restaurant, a poker room and trucker amenities, with a concert July 3. “Willie’s Place” is on IH-35 about 40 miles north of Waco “Willie’s Place at Carl’s Corner” will also process and sell biodeisel fuel.

• Cross Canadian Ragweed frontman Cody Canada draws a line in the Red Dirt between their sound and pop country: “It just keeps getting more pop and more pop. We’re only in our 30s, but we’re kind of old-school, old-fashioned when it comes to country music. If it’s called ‘country music,’ it ought to sound like country music.”

• And last but not least, Twang Nation HQ will be pulling up stakes from beautiful, balmy New York City for new digs in San Francisco, CA. on July 15th (with a long stretch in the homeland, Texas, in between.

Props to retired oil man Larry Berry of Chandler, Texas for returning George Jones’ stolen acoustic Martin-000 guitar which he bought for $10 from two boys at his Fort Worth, Texas, apartment complex in 1962(!)

Berry said he’s been “trying to reach Jones since the 1960s to return it, and finally got through this year.”

The Possum will recieive the long lost instrument on June 14 when Berry will pesent him with the guitar at a performance in Bossier City, La.

What made Berry think that the guitar he bought belonged to Jones? The guitar’s strap had Jones’ name on it with streaks of “White Lightning.”

Yeah, that would do it!

Dana Jennings, New York Times editor and author of the excellent “Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music” (review forthcoming) gives the NYT Paper Cuts blog his country music playlist (Living With Music:A Playlist by Dana Jennings. ) There’s some interesting choices from a guy that obviously loves the music.

The Boston Globe has a nice feature (He’s country but he jumps genres with irreverence) on alt.country journeyman Robbie Fulks. A excerpt:

Fulks, who plays a duo show with his friend Robbie Gjersoe at Club Passim tomorrow night, says that hearing Chet Atkins do Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” on “A Prairie Home Companion” gave him validation for his obsessive urge to demolish musical barriers.

Curiously, he’s both country to the core and an incorrigible iconoclast. “I feel it’s an ongoing tension in my life,” says the singer, who parlayed the considerable buzz of his mid-’90s arrival into a steady, if largely under-the-radar, career as an “alt-country” mainstay.

The tension, he says from his Chicago home, isn’t between country music and everything else as much as it is between “genre and experiment.” Given the choice, he’ll jump the wall every time.

Robbie Fulks “Cigarette State” - Corporate Country Sucks

The Village Voice has a Q&A with Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers and the Mekons (playing the Highline Ballroom this evening.) Langford talks about the Waco Brother’s beginnings, his time on Bloodshot Records and their recent release Waco Express: Live & Kickin’ at Schuba’s Tavern.

Waco Brothers, “Death of Country Music”

• The New York Times has an extensive review of Joe Nick Patoski’s biography, “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life.”
• Ted Hacker, he producer of next weekends BamaJam festival (featuring Hank Williams Jr., Miranda Lambert, Ricky Skaggs and much more), and a former country music manager for the Oak Ridge Boys, Diamond Rio and Darryl Worley details the steps it took to put the festival together.
• Ben Cisneros at the 9513 has nice things to say about Dallas’ Eleven Hundred Springs’ new release “Country Jam.”
• And lots of folks have lots to say, lots, about Jessica Simpson’s newest country music single “Come On Over.” The consensus seems to run toward (and I agree) that Jessica is doing to the song what she did to Tony Romo’s chances for the Superbowl.
• There is some talk about bringing back Austins’ legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. This is the place where, after leaving Nashville, Willie Nelson focused on remaking himself as the hippy/redneck savant as we know him today. (thanks to Linda at Still Is Still Moving - the #1 fan site on Willie Nelson)

Dave Hunter over at the Gibson Guitar’s blog (love their acoustic guitars, but for electric I gotta side with Fender) has taken on the daunting task of choosing the “Top 5 Essential Alt-Country Albums.” No real surprises on the list, and I might have a quibble with one or two of the choices (No Lucinda Williams? No Bottle Rockets?) but it’s a nice introduction for anyone getting into the genre.

The Village Voice has a fine write up (Country Music Grows in Brooklyn) on the burgeoning Country Music scene in Brooklyn and mentions a Twang Nation favorite Hank’s Saloon, a 100 year old hell raising hillbilly bar smack dab between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope which features a trapdoor above the stage leads to an upstairs area once used as a flophouse by Native-American steelworkers. The article al

so mentions the New York Metropolitan Country Music Association which has hosted hoedowns for the last 25 years and now holds weekly line dances at the Glendale Memorial Building in Queens.

Seems there will be at least one singer that won’t be jumping the genre fence anytime soon. Ireland on-line reports that Rod Stewart is enraged with music label bosses at J Records for not giving him the green light to record country classics release.

He says: “Everybody there (at J Records) is against that, which makes me want to do it even more. Apparently, the idea didn’t test well, whatever that means.”

I’m amazed that someone with Stewart’s pedigree still has to ask the label bosses permission to record music. Perhaps he should hire Trent Reznor as a music business consultant. Then again, after listening to his take on the pop classics I believe that Stewart’s country music longings are probably are better off being denied.