Category Archives: Legends

Vince Gill, Mel Tillis and Ralph Emery to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame – October

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NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) – Country music star Vince Gill, singer-songwriter Mel Tillis and TV personality  Ralph Emery will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October, an industry group said on Tuesday.

The three were introduced at a Country Music Association ceremony by stars Brenda Lee, Barbara Mandrell and others, who celebrated Tillis’ upcoming 75th birthday with a giant cake.

The trio will be inducted during the annual CMA Awards Show in October.

Gill, 50, has sold more than 22 million albums, earned 18 CMA awards and won 18 Grammy awards. Last year he released a four-disc set featuring guest performances by Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and others.

Tillis, who struggled with a stuttering problem, wrote numerous hits for himself and others, including “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town.”

Tillis’ acting gigs included appearances in the “Cannonball Run” movies and a few episodes of “The Love Boat.”

Emery, 74, launched his career in 1957 as a late-night disc jockey on WSM Nashville radio. He became an announcer on the Grand Ole Opry and starred on The Nashville Network on a show that drew guests like former President George H.W. Bush and actor Mickey Rooney.

Billy Joe Shaver’s Bluebird Cafe 1992 Performance To Be Released On CD

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On September 11, Billy Joe Shaver will release a CD featuring his 1992 concert at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe titled “Storyteller: Live at the Bluebird 1992.”

The iconic, Texan-born Shaver, now aged 67, has had his share of run-ins with the law including shooting a man in the face. The man did not retain life threatening injuries and Shaver, after turning himself in, was charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a handgun. After a court hearing, he was released on a $50,000 bond.

Along with being a country singer and songwriter he has also performed in movies including “The Wendell Baker Story,” “Secondhand Lions” and “The Apostle.”

Shaver is known among his peers as a survivor having lost his mother and wife to cancer in 1999 and his son in 2000 due to a drug overdose.

The new CD will be released through Sugar Hill Records.

Pop Matter DVD Review – Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music

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Popmatters.com has an excellent review of Robert Elfstrom’s documentary Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, and His Music (1969). The film highlights Cash at his career pinnacle and looks back at his upbringing in rural

Arkansas.From the review: More than that, he was content to dwell in contradiction; he didn’t try to resolve all his warring selves. He was equally the outsider rockabilly and the establishment patriot, the social protestor and the Billy Graham crusader. He gave us a model of cultural ambivalence that we could all identify with. He didn’t solve America’s identity problems, he showed us how to live with them. 

Lucinda Williams Talks to Rolling Stone

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Lucinda Williams talks to Rolling Stone about her upcoming tour, getting hitched and heading back to the studio.

Currently on the road “in the hinterlands” of the Northeast — playing out-of-the-way gigs to extremely appreciative audiences – Williams and her backing trio have been prepping for the special shows, busting out rare cuts, some of which Williams hasn’t performed in over a decade. “The guys are rehearsing them at sound check and we’re tryin’ them out,” she says. “Last night we played “Big Red Sun Blues” and “The Night’s Too Long” [both from Lucinda Williams] and they sounded great.” She says she has a tendency to compare her earliest songs to her most recent. She says, “I’m thinking, ‘Boy, I’ve come a long way as a songwriter.’

Lucinda Willimas to Play Complete Albums in Fall

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From Billboard – Lucinda Williams fans will soon have a chance to hear the songwriter perform five of her eight studio albums in their entirety, one night at a time. On Sept. 5-6 and 8-10, Williams headlines at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles and will perform in New York Sept. 29-30 at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza and Oct. 2-4 at Town Hall.

The first night of each five-night run will kick off with a performance of 2003’s “World Without Tears.” “Essence” from 2001, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” from 1998, “Sweet Old World” from 1990 and “Lucinda Williams” from 1988 will be played on subsequent nights.

The album-focused sets will be followed by a more traditional set from Williams and her band (guitarist Doug Pettibone, bassist David Sutton and drummer Butch Norton), including cuts from her most recent album, “West.” Tickets for all shows go on sale tomorrow (July 21)

“West” bowed at No. 14 on The Billboard 200 and topped the Tastemakers tally in March.

I hope Lu is running the board tapes on these show and releases them by Christmas.

Johnny Cash’s “The Great Lost Performance” to Be Released July 24, 2007

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A first-ever release of a performance by the Man in Black at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey on July 27, 1990 will be released as “Johnny Cash – The Great Lost Performance” (Island/UMe), released July 24, 2007, debuts nearly 17 years to the day of the original concert.

The nearly hour-long CD features the classics – “I Walk The Line,” “Hey Porter” and “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Ring Of Fire,” but will also feature duets with wife June Carter Cash on “Jackson” and “The Wreck Of Old ’97.” The CD will also feature Cash’s first performance of his original “What Is Man?,” and his only recorded version of country gospel’s “Wonderful Time Up There” and “A Beautiful Life,” and his only concert version of “Life’s Railway To Heaven,” whose studio version by Cash
was released only posthumously.

Props to the 9513 for the heads up!

MTV Urge Interviews Porter Wagoner

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Country music’s legend, Porter Wagoner, sits down with MTV Urge for an interview and discusses his start as well as serious health problems he had to overcome to record his new album, Wagonmaster.

You can find the interview here. You’ll need to download the Urge software first, but it”s worth it.

An excerpt: URGE: Your first big break came on Red Foley’s “Ozark Jubilee” show, the first nationally televised country music program. How did you develop your trademark flashy, Nudie-suit image there?

Porter Wagoner: Nudie [Cohn] came to the Ozark Jubilee one day, and I didn’t know who he was. It was in the real early ’50s. He said he made suits for cowboys and people in the movies. And he had a new idea for suits that included rhinestones and sequins … people hadn’t seen anything like that. My answer was, “It’ll probably cost so much I can’t afford it,” because I was barely getting by then. He said, “If this don’t work, they won’t cost you anything. If it does, then I’ll make some money off of making clothes for you throughout your career.” About three or four weeks later I got a big package that had a suit of clothes in it, and a shirt to match it and a pair of boots. It was a peach-colored suit, and it had a big covered wagon across the back of it. It was just unbelievably beautiful. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. That weekend I wore it onstage, and boy, people just went “wow.” That was the first one he’d made for anybody. He had made a lot of different clothes for cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but they didn’t have the sparkle or the glitz.

URGE: You had a life-threatening illness shortly before recording Wagonmaster. How did you bounce back?

Wagoner: I had surgery this past year, July the 14th. I had an aneurysm I had to have taken care of. It got into my kidney. We was talkin’ about doin’ an album at that time, and of course that stopped everything. I started healin’ up, but it took me a long time to get my strength back. Marty [Stuart, album producer] talked to me in the hospital several times [saying], “Let’s get together with a couple of guitars and we’ll sit down and pick some together, and I’d like it if you sang some for me, too.” That really gave me a lot of encouragement, knowing that he was still interested. On the first day, I think we worked 30 to 45 minutes, maybe. He said, “Let’s don’t do too much the first few times here.” And that’s the way we did it. I got to singing and pretty much got my voice back. I was so thrilled to be able to sing again that it really just gave me new inspiration. I was just very fortunate to have somebody like him. Marty loves me like a brother. I had no idea how brilliant he was in the studio. I produced a lot of records, and produced Dolly’s records all the time when she was with me, but he knew new things that I didn’t know. He made a believer out of me. If you could imagine how proud I am of the project. I feel like it’s a touch of brilliance, I really do.

Porter Wagoner – Committed To Parkview

Steve Earle To Host Sirius Radio Show

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From Harp.com – SIRIUS satellite radio has just announced that country-rock legend Steve Earle will host a weekly show on the Outlaw Country station, channel 63.

The Steve Earle Show: Hard Core Troubadour Radio will be a one hour program featuring Earle’s personal music selections as well as on-air interviews with special guests. In more than thirty years of music-making, Earle has been nominated 11 times for a Grammy award, and has one win for The Revolution Starts Now in 2005. Earle has recently been in the studio recording his upcoming album on New West Records, with producer John King of The Dust Brothers, and also had a weekly show on Air America which he is leaving for his new gig at SIRIUS.

Outlaw Country was created by Little Steven Van Zandt and is home to the equally maverick likes of Shooter Jennings and Cowboy Jack Clement. Earle’s program will be broadcast Saturdays at 8pm ET and can also be heard Sundays at 1am and 9am and Monday nights at midnight.

I wonder if Sirius will give Earle the long leash that Air America did when he goes off on the powers that be. They will if they’re smart. Steve Earle’s politics are as much a part of what results in his extraordinary talent as his heroin use and obnoxious attitude. Let Earle be Earle. Let him rant and rave about the carpetbagger boy-king W and play some of the best music ever to travel the galaxy.

Emmylou Harris Prepares Box Set / New Release

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From Billboard.com – Emmylou Harris is preparing a 80-song boxed set due Sept. 18 via Rhino, which features two discs of obscure studio work and two additional CDs of rarities, many of them previously unreleased.

“For the most part, none of these songs have ever been on a compilation before,” Harris tells Billboard.com. “They’re kind of favorites — I call them my orphans, songs that maybe I didn’t even perform that much but I loved enough to record in the studio. They didn’t quite fit either the Hot Band or whatever I was doing. Things like ‘Coat of Many Colors,’ which was one of my favorite songs of all time, or ‘Ballad of a Runaway Horse’ and ‘1917.’”

Also included are several unreleased recordings with her Trio, which also featured Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt. “There’s an outtake from the aborted Trio album that we did in 1978, a Carter Family song called ‘Palms of Victory’ that’s just live off the floor,” Harris says. “There’s not even a solo on it — it’s just the band and the three women singing and I sound like I’m channeling Sara Carter. I wish — in my dreams!”

The second two discs boast numerous tracks Harris has recorded for tribute albums to such acts as Gram Parsons, Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt, as well as the original demo for “All I Left Behind” with Kate and Anna McGarrigle.

Harris put her next studio effort on hold to finish the boxed set, but is making progress on a new Nonesuch album with assistance from the McGarrigle sisters and Seldom Scene lead singer John Starling. Harris duets with the latter on “Old Five and Dimers” (“I finally decided that I was old enough to cut that song, reaching the grand ole age of 60,” she laughs).

“It’s kind of a combination of some of my own songs, some songs that I’ve wanted to record for a long time and some new things that I came across,” she offers of the effort. “You’ll get obth Emmylou the interpreter and Emmylou the songwriter.”

Harris, who will also tour heavily into the fall, has recently recorded guest spots for Parton’s next studio album, an Anne Murray duets album and old friend Danny Flowers’ “Tools for the Soul.”

Emmylou Harris – Making Believe