I’m baaaack. So if you’ve been keeping up with my tweets, or just reading the news,  you know the 10th Annual Americana Association Conference and Festival in Nashville last week was quite a shin-dig. I missed goodBBQ and that laid-back Southern charm and although the conference attendance seemed to be down a bit (well, a lot actually), if my Shiner fogged memory serves me, the showcases were better than ever.

There were a number of memorable nuggets that I wanted to quickly share. For one thing, there must be an aging painting in Jim Lauderdale’s attic becuase the man that is ubiquitous not only at the AMA event but in Americana music in general, still beams with youthful charm.

The performance that made my biggest impression was a serendipitous discovery. A friend’s showcase Friday afternoon at BB Kings brought Dallas’ Somebody’s Darlng to my radar. I should be ashamed of not knowing about them earlier since they hail from my home town and they rocked my ass with a their roots-rock soul sound.

Then there was the two great guitar pulls. The Douglas Corner Cafe featured The Americana Renegades Show with excellent performance by Irene Kelley, Roger Saloom, Joe Whyte and Stoll Vaughan. The club was like a Blue Bird Cafe II with a reverent and attentive audience. Then I lucked into getting out of the rain and a long line at the Station Inn to see Nanci Griffith, Mary Gauthier & Elizabeth Cook in their own audience hushing performance was a great treat.

Seeing Bearfoot do their short set at the Compass records’ notorious Hillbilly Central open house was also a nice surprise. I was not familiar with this newgrass band but they held the packed audience in spellbound attention with their performance and did musch less cocaine than the former Hillbilly Central residents.

There was the spellbinding rustic winsomeness of Amanda Shires. The leather-tough gold-hearted girl  – Angela Easterling (w. Will Kimbrough), and the omnipresence of Austin Texas with The Gourds, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Asleep at the Wheel, Reckless Kelly, Radney Foster and Charlie Robison.

Then there was standing near the stage to behold the wonder that is John Fogerty (along with Buddy Miller) at his semi-secret show at the Cannery. Wow…wow…

It was old-school alt-country at the closing night at the Basement with the ex-singer of Nashville super group BR549, Chuck Mead, and the only band that rivals the Drive By Truckers for a live performance, the Bottle Rockets, sending the whole thing off to a booming, bitter-sweet end.

Then there were the artists, radio, writers, fellow bloggers and general soldiers that, like myself, champion this music each and every day out of love more than riches (Ha!)

You can’t be everywhere all the time, and the four performance spaces for the AMA festival are a considerable distance from each other, so there are tough choices to be made and many show I wish I could have attended. But with a little logistics and a dash of serendipitous happenstance this trip to Nashville was a great party with wonderful memories (from what I can remember!)

NoDepression.com reports that Bloodshot Records recording artists, and son to Steve Earle and namesake of Townes Van Zant, Justin Townes Earle, will be releasing a follow up to the excellent Bloodshot debut The Good Life. The new disc is called Midnight at the Movies, and is due out in March of ‘09.

If you’re in Texas get yer ass out and see one of the best bar bands in America , The Supersuckers.

Nov 14 2008 – Jacks Patio Bar  –   San Antonio, Texas
Nov 17 2008  – Vortex  –   Beaumont, Texas
Nov 18 2008   – Continental Club  –   Houston, Texas
Nov 19 2008  -  Continental Club   -  Houston, Texas
Nov 20 2008   – Lakewood Bar and Grill  –   Dallas, Texas
Nov 21 2008   -  Scoot Inn  –   Austin, Texas

If you’re in my neck of the woods, San Francisco, CA. get yer ass out and see the one and only Texas Yoda, Willie Nelson at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium. Willie plays Friday, Jan 16,  Saturday, Jan 17, PM Sunday, Jan 18, Monday, Jan 19, and Tuesday, Jan 20. Must be all that good medical marijuana here in town.

Looks like Mike Curb is going to do right by Hank III and release his new album on the originally slated date. For those of you that just can’t wait for tomorrow’s release of Hank Williams III “Damn Right, Rebel Proud” head over to the online listening station and hear the release in it’s entirety. Let me say that again, entirity.

Hank III – Damn Right, Rebel Proud EPK

First off -  Happy Birthday Dale Watson! Bubba you’re the Deal Deal!

The Villiage Voice has some choice (and funny) words about the new Lee Ann Womack release “Call Me Crazy.” “PowerPoint presentation in Music Row Pandering 10…” Ha!

Chris Parton over at the CMT blog has a brief, but still cool, observation of the Nashville Hank III show.

It seems that Willie Nelson has asked the King of Country Western Troubadours Unknown Hinson and Billy Bob Thorton’s band The Boxmasters to open some shows for him starting November 21 and ending around December 9. This should be a great show so get out therre and see it if you can. On a releated note Unknown Hinson and the Boxmasters will be  crashing on Regis and Kelly on oct 17. Damn, I wasn’t ware those boys could get up that early!

Dale Watson – Country My Ass

You can keep your Carrie Underwoods, your Taylor Swifts, your Jewels and your Jessica Simpsons…I’ll take a beer and another song by Michigan’s Rachel Brooke.

Rachelle Brooke Covering Hank William’s Old Log Train

To celebrate the August 19th release of “Gravity’s Our Enemy” Cadillac Sky and Skaggs Family Records will be holding two, count ‘em, two release parties.

The first takes place in  Nashville, Tennessee where those C-Sky’s boys will take the stage at the prestigious Grand Ole Opry. The show starts at 9pm. The second will take place Wednesday, August 20th in Fort Worth, Texas, hometown of the band, at Lola’s.  The party gets started at 7:30pm (admission is free with purchase of the cd), so get there early to get your place in line!

If you can’t make it to a show in person Cadillac Sky will bring the party to you. Just log on to www.skaggsfamilyrecords.com on Tuesday at 9:00pm (Central) and witness the birth of “Gravity’s Our Enemy” live on the webcast as it happens.

Cadillac Sky – “Born Lonesome”

Popmatters.com has a review of the DVD “Bill Monroe: Father of Bluegrass Music” which they discribe as “Informative and educational, intriguing and entertaining, part American history lesson, part biography and part concert film…”

The good folks over at The 9513 brought to my attention that current Twang Nation favorite Jamey Johnson will be joining Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and Kenny Chesney (?!) for the 2008 Farm Aid music festival in New England on Sept. 20. Nashville Scene (High Lonesome Sound) and CMT.com(Don’t Tell Jamey Johnson That He’s “Too Country”) both offer features on Johnson.

The guardian.co.uk Music Blog has a brief run down of the current state of American alt.country/Americana scene (Are you ready for (more of) the country?)

Chrissie Hynde of the bad the Pretenders states that the bands first new album in six years (“Break up the Concrete”) will be “moving in a country direction.” Of all the country music carpet bagging that has been happening recently I have to say that a musician with Hynde’s credibility makes me think she’ll do it right, but she is a vegitarian, so does this mean that Jessica Simpson has to get another t-shirt?

No Depression magazine, the bible of alt/roots/country/Americana music and lifestyle for thirteen years is making a comeback of sorts. Nodpression.com will be relaunched in late September and will be edited by the magazine’s founding co-editor Peter Blackstock and will include regular blogs by many of the magazine’s most frequent contributors, including Blackstock and fellow founding co-editor Grant Alden.

The new site will also include record reviews and live reviews, features on emerging artists, news updates, the current web site’s popular upcoming-releases list, reader-participant discussion forums — and, perhaps most significantly, a vast and cross-referenced archive featuring almost all the content from No Depression magazine’s 75 issues published from 1995 to 2008.

In preparation for the September relaunch, the website is promoting the No Depression Founders Circle, a way for fans and supporters of the magazine to take a financial stake in the new web site’s continued existence. I think this is a good move that I wish had been taken back before the magazine folded. I for one would have paid for the coverage ND provided that I could not find gathered between a set of magazine covers.

In my opinion ND lost their way when the publishers started to think about their audience as a demographic instead of a congregation of sorts. They went from having John Prine and Johnny Cash on thre cover to featuring the then alt.rock flavor of the month The Shins. Like a politician, they attempted to move to the mainstream, toward popularity with the mainstream and their pocketbooks, at the riisk of alietnating thier hard-core and reverent followers. Someone should have told them that a vast majority of Americans distrust politicians and lawyers for just this very reason, they appear to stand for nothing but whatever will help them win at the moment. That is almost exactly the definition of shiftless. The congirigation lost faith after that and hard times became even harder.

As an added incentive for getting eyeballs, folks who sign up for the website’s mailing list at NoDepression.com will be eligible to win an Epiphone DR-100 Vintage Sunburst acoustic guitar which has been provided by Epiphone. Great email bait! I singed up this morning!

Also a new No Depression “bookazine” (to be designated No Depression #76) also will be available in print-form on the shelves of bookstores nationwide in October. The publication, a joint venture between ND and the University of Texas Press, will be issued twice annually (every fall and spring). Blackstock and Alden will serve as co-editors, with Alden also reprising his magazine role as art director. A handful of book-release events at bookstores and record stores nationwide are also in the works. I appuad this effort and look forward to it, at the same time I wonder why something like this couldn’t have been applied to the magazine in it’s former incarnation.

All of this is no surprise for anyone that read the publishers online adios to the magazine: “Plans to expand the publication’s website (www.nodepression.net) with additional content will move forward, though it will in no way replace the print edition.” Why Grant and Peter weren’t doing this in conjunction with the print version of ND all along is a mystery to me, but I say better late than never. Get over there, sign up for their emails and send them cash. The world that I cover and we all love is a better place with them in it.

I’m always fascinated when country music is honored and performed by folks overseas. I’m also interested in how new bands are able to use the web to do much of the heavy lifting traditionally done in the past by big labels with big money and a large staff. I get both of these plus great music with Belfast Ireland’s country rock band Jackson Cage. The Jackson Cage I’m most familiar with is a dour song about suburban futility by Bruce Springsteen on his release “The River.”  Jackson Cage the band do exhibit some of New Jersey’s most famous hillbilly’s knack for narrative, but only inasmuch as he was willing to channel Dylan, Woody Guthrie and The Band to tell a compellingly stark tale.

Jackson Cage’s self-funded, self-released, self-promoted and self-titled debut album managed to hit #1 on the most popular Alt Country Albums on Amazon MP3 (it currently sits at #5 just after Ryan Bingham’s Mescalito.) What makes all this more impressive is that Amazon only sells MP3s to US customers.

Jackson Cage is one of those rare cases where a band exhibits a skillful grasp of great music roots while working contemporrary technology just as adeptly. Keep your eye on Jackson Cage.

Jackson Cage – Taste the Moon(mp3)

Jackson Cage – White Line(mp3)

Jackson Cage  – I ain’t gonna waste my time(mp3)

Last night’s Tom Waits show in Dallas was along waited treasure for this fan. You can read more here and here. Waits has been mining a vein of American music that is uniquely his own through his career and his songs have been covered by Allison Krauss, Johnny Cash and the Ramones among many many others (notice the intended omission of one Ms. Scarlett Johansson.)  

Big thumbs down for the venue, The Palladium Ballroom, for the lack of air conditioning for a two thousand plus crowd on a hot Texas June night.

Tom Waits: Innocent When You Dream, Houston 2008