A remembrance– A year ago this May, and just a few months after recording his final album, Traveling Through, for Rounder Records, Dick Curless — often called “The Baron of Country Music” and known for his black eye patch and rich baritone voice — died of a rare and inoperable form of stomach cancer. What [...]

“For Beginners Only”, this disc might have been subtitled, considering how it skims but the slightest sliver off the surface of the subject it purports to present. Still, it has its place. Fact is, many folks today who are coming at country music from a bass-backwards perspective — won over by such alt-country heroes as [...]

Were you shocked when you first saw Donald and Ivana Trump peddling stuffed-crust pizza on TV? Maybe just a little baffled by George and Alana reuniting for another damn talk show? Well, you shouldn’t have been, because they were just following the tried-and-true George and Tammy marketing rationale. Heck, when Together Again originally came out, [...]

Long before he was the Silver Fox, the platinum-haired crooner of mid-’70s crossover hits such as “Behind Closed Doors” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”, Charlie Rich was one of the new golden boys at Sun Records in the late ’50s, when Sam Phillips was desperately seeking the successors to Elvis, Johnny and [...]

For those of you lucky enough not to be listening to country radio in the early ’70s, Moe Bandy’s hard-drinking hard country may be a subtle pleasure upon a first listen. But set against the backdrop of the countrypolitan sound that dominated country radio in the post-Vietnam era, the rough-edged traditionalism of the smoke-slicing fiddle [...]

By the end of the 1970s, “outlaw country” was as dead a moniker as “grunge rock” is today. Yet several years earlier, the term represented nothing short of a revolution — an honest attempt by country musicians to gain creative control of their music (in Nashville, producers traditionally held the reins). The result was a [...]

Driving toward the desert on a fool’s errand, our colleague Neal Weiss observed it odd that some of the most revered of the new alt-country bands are viewed as trailblazers for recreating the classic sounds of ’40s and ’50s country. And he’s right. It is curiously conservative and strangely out of place that the lady [...]

Tom T. Hall sings country songs with such ease, you’d think the words and melodies flowed like blood through his veins. Maybe they do. Born in 1936, the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Kentucky, Hall quit school at 15, but he always loved music and writing, and couldn’t stay away from either. After [...]