This odd little compilation from Fireant Records, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, manages to be both disappointing and essential.
Alas, the disappointments lie in fundamental areas. First, the sound quality is on par with that third-generation Neil Young bootleg cassette in your glove compartment. Second, the roster is uneven at best. Chapel Hill’s Zen Frisbee [...]

Just what kind of moonshine are those folks at Bloodshot Records drinking anyhow? After three excellent compilations of what they like to call insurgent country and a stable full of like-minded recording artists, the Chicago label has gotten downright conceptual with Straight Outta Boone County. WLW’s Boone County Jamboree and the Midwest Hayride were two [...]

From A.P. Carter to Iris DeMent, the history of country music is filled with artists who first raised their voices in song within the walls of some tiny church. In fact, it was through the Southern white gospel traditions of shape-note singing, singing schools, and hymn books such as Sacred Harp that the use of [...]

Given North Carolina’s increasing reputation as Ground Zero for new country-rock bands, it’s hardly surprising that The Old North State dominates Revival (billed as a compilation of “the Southeast’s Hottest Bands”), with 11 of 17 selections.
Indeed, if you’ve been following No Depression since its inception, this is practically a regional Southeastern sampler for the magazine. [...]

Given that the country music form is well-suited to storytelling, it is by nature also a fertile medium for addressing social issues. This compilation, recently reissued by Rounder after originally being released in 1989, is evidence of that, gathering 16 songs from the 1920s and ’30s that address social concerns, specifically those of the working [...]

Stephen W. Terrell is a highly literate humorist. Well, he’s also some kinda music journalist down in Santa Fe. Anyway, Picnic Time (which reprises nine cuts from its successor, Pandemonium Juke_box) restores his music to print after two ill-fated bouts with indie labels in the ’80s. Or after two bouts with ill-fated indie labels.
Writing funny [...]

As someone once noted, bluegrass somehow suggests a wilder yet simpler time. For Alison Krauss, now the music’s undisputed star, that time was the ’70s. Krauss grew up listening to traditional bluegrass, as well as such progressive bands as the New South, Boone Creek and New Grass Revival. But lately, she’s also confessed her love [...]

Sometimes I think the entire alternative-country community (whoever we are) is really just a buncha folks trying to weasel out of day jobs. Well, work as a rock critic is neither as honorable nor as odious as most, and Monday’s mail is often much like Christmas: Lots of packages, frequent disappointment. Which is how I [...]

I stumbled across this Minneapolis band when they opened for Gillian Welch at Schuba’s in Chicago a year ago. At the time they struck me as a reticent version of the Pogues, with an Americana heart supplied by Eric Christopher’s Telecaster and fiddle fills. I wasn’t wowed, but after listening to their six-song cassette on [...]

The most memorable True Believers performance I ever witnessed was on a hot June night 12 years ago at the fabled Continental Club in Austin, Texas — a show that concluded with the Believers, Doctors’ Mob and Scratch Acid all onstage together in varying states of sobriety slogging through Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part [...]