• Check out the video tour diary from Bruce Robison as he Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider proceed up and down the East Coast and back into Texas on their Barstool Tour.

• Linda Lee at the super Willie Nelson blog StillIsStillMoving.com interviews Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck.

• Check out the excellent videos of Casey Driessen’s 5-string fiddle hunt video over at Bluegrass Blog.

• Steel guitarist Robert D. Norred, one-time member of Hank Williams’ backing band for a short period in the late 1940s, died Sunday, Oct. 25.

• Face A Frowning World (Available 12/8 – Tompkins Square) is a tribute to the old-timey and gospel music of  E.C. Ball and his wife Orna. The couple were lesser known contemporaries of the Carter Family and seldom ventured far from their home on the Virginia-North Carolina boarder (in Rugby, VA) where they owned a general store and service station. Featured performance by  Jon Langford,  The Handsome Family (offered as a download below),  Michael Hurley, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band of Louisville, Kentucky, and many others.

Jenny Jenkins by The Handsome Family

When I Get Home I’m Gonna Be Satisfied by Jon Langford

Add this to your awesome festivals to attend list! The annul MusicFest (now approaching its 25th year) features some of the finest Americana and roots music to the world-class ski resort of Steamboat, Colorado for 6 days (January 4-11th) of snowy fun. Performers already booked for the next MusicFest are: Robert Earl Keen, Randy Rogers Band, Band of Heathens, Reckless Kelly, Charlie Robison, Kevin Welch, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Lee Ann Womack, Jamie Wilson, Todd Snider, Jason Eady and The Wayward Apostles, Billy Joe Shaver, Matt Skinner, Jack Ingram, Dean Dillion, Bonnie Bishop, Chris Knight, Walt Wilkins, Midnight River Choir, Jonathan Tyler and The Northern Lights, Kevin Fowler, Modern Day Drifters, Hayes Carll, Ben Smith, Jason Boland and The Stragglers, Josh Abbott, Cory Morrow, Ray Wylie Hubbard, The Trishas, Wade Bowen, The Doug Moreland Show, Stoney LaRue, Tina Wilkins, Roger Creager, Lucas Hubbard, Sean McConnell, Johnny and The Footlights…and more on the way!

• The Los Angeles Times features a cool story on the Roots on Rails travel program organized by the Vermont-based Flying Under Radar travel service. This feature focuses on a train ride through the Southwest presenting Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock (AKA The Flatlanders) and Dave Alvin. Guests pay to travel with the artists and intimate performance occur in the dining car. It’s like a house concert on tracks. Other Roots on Rails trips have featured Tom Russell, Terry Allen, Stan Ridgway, Jill Sobule, the Handsome Family and many others.

• Paste Magazine posts their 9 reasons they love Miranda Lambert.

• Tom Russell will be performing on the David Letterman Show this Thursday October 1st. Russell is currently supporting his excellent new release Blood and Candle Smoke.

• PopMatters.com sits down for a Q&A with Merle Haggard.  The Hag discusses his recent lung cancer surgery, how he chooses set lists from his vast catalog, and makes his case for being the “great arbitrator.”

• If you buy Robert Earl Keen’s new Lost Highway Records debut The Rose Hotel at select stores you will also receive a free Lost Highway’s limited, T for Texas, T from Tennessee music sampler. This freebie will include music from Lyle Lovett, Ryan Bingham, Black Joe Lewis, Hayes Carll & more.

• We all know Courtney Love is nuts. Now she’s going nuts on Ryan Adams claiming that he stole $858,000 of daughter Frances Bean Cobain’s money to fund his 2003 album Rock n Roll. I would be pissed too if I had bankrolled that piece of crap.

• Hey Bay Area twang fans! The San Francisco Weekly features a story on Joe Goldmark and the Seducers and their ongoing Sunday night residency at the Outer Sunset bar Riptide which bills itself as “the Bay Area’s best little honky-tonk.”

• The Salt Lake Tribune sits down with legendary Texas songer/songwriter Robert Earl Keen.

• Aquarium Drunkard sits down with Athens, Georgia-based alt.folk legend Vic Chesnutt.

• Patsy Cline’s hometown fixes up the house she and her family once lived in. (CMT.com)

• Legendary rocker, and label mate of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis has released his first country single since the 1970s, Mean Old Man (you can get it now at Amazon for free.) The song was written by Kris Kristofferson and will be part of a new CD that will be released soon on Shangri-La Music.

• The line-up for Cross Canadian Ragweed’s 4th Annual Red Dirt Roundup has been announce,  and the roster is filled with names that make any Texas music lover proud – CCR, Charlie Robison, Robert Earl Keen, Johnny Cooper, The Gourds as well as the alt rock of The Wallflowers. The festival will be held on two stages at the Historic Stockyards in Fort Worth, Texas on Sunday, Sept. 6. on the former cattle pens – the “North Forty” fields just east of Billy Bob’s Texas. Check the Red Dirt Roundup site for ticket and time information.

• CMT Blog’s  Whitney Self revisits Jessi Colter’s Out of the Ashes.

• The Americana Music Association conference is right around the corner (Sept 16-19) and it’s shaping up tto be a great one. Amy Speace is the newest addition to the already excellent roster (The Station Inn -  Sept 16 @ 10 PM) You can nor keep up with the AMA on twitter for up to the minute information about the Festival and Conference, including ticket giveaways and behind the scenes info. If you’re going drop me a line!

• Southern-rock stalwarts  the Kentucky Headhunters will release The Kentucky Headhunters Live/Agora Ballroom – Cleveland, Ohio – May 13, 1990 (Mercury/UMe) on on September 22, 2009, the 20th anniversary of 1989 debut album, Pickin’ On Nashville.

• Canada.com posts a feature on the upcoming album of classics by Willie Nelson, American Classic – Willie Nelson returns to ‘the good songs’ (release 8/25)

• The New York Times also features a piece on Willie Nelson’s American Classic.

• The Boston Herald posts a feature on honky-tonk neo-traditionalist Paul Burch- Looking for authentic country soul? Burch is ‘Still Your Man’ – about his new release and the music business.

• I have come to the acceptance step of the grief cycle, bit Todd VanDerWerff’s excellent and exhaustive re-review of the HBO Western series Deadwood at The Onion’s TV Club brings a smile to my face.

• Check out Kim Ruehl’s interview with Santa Cruz’s roots band The Devil Makes Three from the Bumbershoot music festival.

• Tom Russell posts a new addition to his blog giving context and back stories to the songs on his upcoming Calexeco-backed album Blood and Candle Smoke.

• Bruce Robison posts on his MySpace blog that he will have a song in Texas cartoon mogal Mike Judge(Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill) film Extract and that he’ll be heading out  on tour with Robert Earl Keen and Todd Snider. (via the 9513.com)

• Patty Griffin’s upcoming Buddy Miller produced Gospel album Downtown Church will be released in early 2010 and was recorded earlier this year in the sanctuary of the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, according to her website.

• The Green Bay Press Gazette has a great interview with Justin Townes Earle. Earle talks candidly about his past addictions and is troubled relationship with his father. as well as his excellent new release Midnight at the Movies.

• Robert Earl Keen’s Lost Highway debut “The Rose Hotel,” produced by Lloyd Maines, will be released on On Sept. 29

• Rounder Records will celebrate their 40th anniversary on Oct. 12th at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, TN with performances from Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bela Fleck and Irma Thomas will join in this momentous celebration along with musical host Minnie Driver and special guests to be announced.

• Shreveport-based , the Louisiana Hayride (1948 to 1960) will  be inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. In it’s day the country music showcase featured Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, George Jones, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.

• The grave of the late great Texas blues musician, Blind Willie Johnson, is  finally discovered. Johnson’s songs have been covered by everybody from Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

• Details magazine sits down with Native Texan and anti-Taylor Swift blond bad ass Miranda Lambert for some Q&A.

• Nashville Scene’s newest cover has  “Three Hot Acts Present a New Breed of Female Songwriter” featuring Caitlin Rose, Tristen Gaspadarek and Those Darlins.

• Texas Monthly’s Pitch Perfect features five legendary Texas musicians—Guy Clark, Patty Griffin, Sonny Throckmorton, Robert Earl Keen, and Jack Ingram— and asks them to sgare the mystic secrets to writing a great country song.  It’s a funny, informative a great read.

• The nominees for the 20th International Bluegrass Music Awards Awards has been announced (Yay SteelDrivers!) The ceremony will be hosted by Grammy-winning country artist Kathy Mattea and the legendary bluegrass band, Hot Rize, on Thursday, October 1, 2009, at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.

• Legendary guitar pioneer Les Paul died today at the age of 94 at White Plains Hospital due to complications from pneumonia.

• More info on Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar work for the upcoming Jack Kerouac soundtrack collaborative album entitled “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur.”  The twelve song set is due October 20 via F-Stop/Atlantic and will serve as the soundtrack to the Kerouac documentary of the same title.  Farrar and Gibbard were approached by the filmmakers in 2007 about writing music for the film, which documents the events surrounding the author’s time spent in the Big Sur region of California.

Rita 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

• Craig Shelburne  over at the CMT blog has posted a great video I had never see with Willie Nelson and fantastic bluegrass Melonie Cannon covering Willie’s Back to Earth.

• Speaking of Texas (Wille, Texas…same thing) If you’re in the San Francisco area tomorrow night head over to the historic Fillmore to catch Houston’s own Robert Earl Keen with the great Hayes Carl as the opener
• <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

  I heard that Miley Cyrus is slated to Perform at the 4th Annual Country Music Awards on April 5. Aand here I thought it was Miley’s buddy Taylor Swift’s job to serve the ‘tween demographic with insipid tales of mall heartache. Or maybe that’s Carrie Underwood… Point is the CMA’s continue to embody thier new acronym definition, Country Music my Ass.

• Murfreesboro, Tenn’s country-punk sweethearts of the prison rodeo, Those Darlins,  got a lot of deserved attention at SXSW ‘09 and it looks like they are due for more love this Summer when their self-titled debut album is released on July 7^th (vinyl on July 23^rd) on OH WOW DANG records. Here’s the title cut off their current Wild One EP to hold you over until then.

<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

Those Darlins – Wild One(mp3)