Music to feed your life
Pistol Packin’ Mama” made Al Dexter, who both wrote the song and sang the original recording, a household name in the 1940s. A bouncy little number about a gal who barges into a tavern looking to gun down her cheating man, it sold a million well before the year was out and also became the first country song to top the pop-music charts. It boiled out of nearly every jukebox…
Joe Diffie arrived on the Nashville scene when the hat acts were just getting off the ground — and a neo-trad sound was very much in vogue.
The Police were just starting out, and their work with Schoener helped gain them visibility. The collaboration may seem odd, but it wasn’t random.
Joshua Hedley’s song “Mr. Jukebox” has the sort of universal appeal that few current country songs – ‘old school’ or Top 40 – have achieved.
The mid-1990s was the height of what was then called “alternative country” (a.k.a. alt country, twangcore, yalternative and a host of other somewhat unfortunate names). Thank god we’ve now settled on the more dignified Americana. Two of the biggest bands in the alt-country world were Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown, but Massachusetts group the Scud Mountain Boys also gained a strong following. Led by singer-songwriter Joe Pernice, they took a laid-back,…
So many complex emotions in a single song. This is a quality that set Merle Haggard apart. And a big reason why his songs resonate so strongly, even many decades past when they were written and first released. My favorite Haggard album is Someday We’ll Look Back. His 14th studio album, he released it in 1971, just two years after the massive success of “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’…
This week we lost of my all-time favorite country singer-songwriters, Steve Young. The writer of several classic songs made famous by some of the era’s biggest stars, Young was also a superb singer in his own right, and he has a string of excellent solo albums to prove it. On top of that, by many accounts (including my own experience) he was a wonderful man with a humble soul and…
Have you ever seen a bluegrass band that includes cello? How about a French horn? If that concept catches your attention, you’ve got to check out the music of Al Scorch. Al and his band played an afternoon gig last Sunday at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, a monthly winter series dubbed Al Scorch’s’ Winter Slumber. It’s free, it’s fun and if you’re in the area, highly recommended. Scorch’s music…
I just spent several hours going through a list of this year’s GRAMMY nominees, finding videos, for each nominated song, a task associated with my day job at Radio.com. It was at times tedious but also, in many cases, fun and eye-opening. There’s a lot of, shall we say, less-than-inspirational music on the list, especially among the categories that wind up on television. But dig deep and you’ll find some…
No question: A Most Violent Year is a powerful film, one of the best I’ve seen in the past year. I was a fan of director J.C. Chandor’s 2011 release Margin Call, and his new film takes a vastly different but equally compelling perspective on capitalism in America. The story focuses on the expansion plans of a heating oil executive in New York City in 1981, which sounds potentially mundane…