PRI’s The World featured a great segment with correspondent Julie Caine profiling Japanese teacher and country and western singer Toshio Hirano. Hirano heard Jimmie Rogers when he was a teenager and he talks about how it changed his life. Hirano currently lives, plays live, and evangelizes the gospel of Jimmie Rogers in San Francisco, CA.

From Variety.com - Plans are in motion for documentarians David Leaf (The U.S. vs. John Lennon) and Morgan Neville (The Night James Brown Saved Boston) to chronicle the history of country music/ the series will be produced by Shout! Factory and Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The individual segments will be thematically divided. On the slate are “The Roots of Country and Bluegrass,” “The Honky Tonk Tradition,” “Outlaw Country,” “The Nashville Sound,” “The Politics of Country,” “Country Songs and Songwriters,” “California Country” and “No Depression,” a look at the alternative country music movement.

Modern country stars will be participating in the films, providing their personal connections to the past.
“We are always looking for new ways to reach and expand our audience and tell them the story of this uniquely American genre,” said Kyle Young, director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The Hall of Fame and Shout! Factory, founded by music industry vets Richard Foos, Bob Emmer and Garson Foos, first partnered last year to create DVD collections culled from the museum’s archive.

I hope this is half as good as the BBC 2003 four-part series Lost Highway: The True Story of Country Music.

60 years ago in this day, June 11th 1949, Hank Sr. made his famous debut on the Grand Ole Opry.  He sang his hit Lovesick Blues and received a record number of ovations and encores, the Opry and Country Music were never the same.

Help reinstate Hank to the Opry.

As I’ve mentioned before Nonesuch Records will release Emmylou Harris’ new album “All I Intended to Be” (Nonesuch) on June 10. This will be her first solo effort since 2003’s Stumble Into Grace.

Listen to some samples of the release at the Nonesuch site.

Here is the track listing:

1. Shores of White Sand (Jack Wesley Routh)
2. Hold On (Jude Johnstone)
3. Moon Song (Patty Griffin)
4. Broken Man’s Lament (Mark Germino)
5. Gold (Emmylou Harris)
6. How She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower (Emmylou Harris, Kate and Anna McGarrigle)
7. All That You Have is Your Soul (Tracy Chapman)
8. Take That Ride (Emmylou Harris)
9. Old Five and Dimers Like Me (Billy Joe Shaver)
10. Kern River (Merle Haggard)
11. Not Enough (Emmylou Harris)
12. Sailing Round the Room (Emmylou Harris, Kate and Anna McGarrigle)
13. Beyond the Great Divide (J.C. Crowley and Jack Wesley Routh)

Emmylou is currently on tour:

6/6/2008 Morrison, CO Red Rocks Ampitheatre
6/8/2008 Lawrence, KS Wakarusa Festival
6/14/2008 Lisle, IL Morton Arboretum
6/16/2008 Toronto, Canada Massey Hall
6/18/2008 New York, NY Town Hall
6/19/2008 New York, NY Town Hall
6/20/2008 Oyster Bay, NY The Planting Fields Arboretum
6/22/2008 Vienna, VA Wolf Trap Filene Center
6/23/2008 Charlottesville, VA Charlottesville Pavilion
6/25/2008 Raleigh, NC North Carolina Museum of Art
6/27/2008 Atlanta, GA Chastain Park Amphitheatre
7/17/2008 Avon, CO Vilar Center for the Arts at Beavercreek Resort)
7/19/2008 Alta, WY Grand Targhee Americana Festival
7/20/2008 Salt Lake City, UT Red Butte Garden Ampitheatre
7/23/2008 Vancouver, Canada Orpheum Theater
7/31/2008 San Diego, CA Humphrey’s Concerts By the Bay

I (justifiably) bitch a lot about Music City and tier ongoing campaign to strangle any beauty and creativity out of
country music, but one tradition I do like is the idea of the annual Fan Fare (my contrarian nature won’t allow me
to use the new corporate friendly title “CMA Music Festival”)

This years event features 30 hours of autograph signings, 100 hours of live music, 400 Country Music artists and
celebrities.”

Now 90% of these “Country Music artists and celebrities” I wouldn’t cross the street to meet, but I do applaud the
populist spirit of the event (as well as inviting Dwight Yoakam back after an unconscionable 20 year absence.)This is
something you won’t find in any other genre and it speaks to country music’s respect for it’s fans. Now if Music City
only reflected that same deference to tradition and fans’ intelligence when producing the music.

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 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.

Ex bull-rider and troubadour of dusty trails and hard living Ryan Bingham discusses with PopMatters.com how his latest release, “Mescalito” (Lost Highway), came to be. Bingham also says that he is working on the follow-up to “Mescalito,” which he hopes to release early next year, and is sticking with Marc Ford as producer.

Bingham will be playing at the Mercury Lounge in New York City tonight appearing with David McMillin.

Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses - Bread and Water