Between 1980 and 1986, Slash Records assembled a talented roster of acts that included, at one time X, the Blasters, Los Lobos and the BoDeans. With its acquisition of reissue rights for Slash’s catalog, Rhino has begun tapping into the impressive body of work compiled by these artists.
The Best Of BoDeans: Slash And Burn marks [...]

When this album first appeared in 1995 (on Capricorn), it was part of the newly unfolding career of Vic Chesnutt. Recorded two years earlier, it found him singing and playing his songs in an aggregate populated otherwise with the members of Widespread Panic. This Athens, Georgia, troupe has Vic’s stamp all over it, with his [...]

Whatever the medium — literature, film, music — it’s rare enough for an artist to forge a truly distinct, expansive voice, a personal style at once immediately recognizable and endlessly flexible. Rarer still, to discover this gift in one’s late 30s, a period viewed all too typically by our youth-obsessed culture as creatively stagnant and [...]

The 1980s were a tough time for bluegrass. Between the last wave of mass interest in the mid-’70s and the first stirrings of another one more than ten years later, a kind of lassitude threatened to overtake the genre. Still, there were a few bright spots on the scene, and by almost any standard Hot [...]

He’s the answer to the question, “Who wrote for Buddy Holly, was backed up live by Bob Dylan, and recorded with Gram Parsons?” The late Fred Neil was a unique figure, associated, as the title of this reissued 1965 Elektra LP suggests, with the ’60s Village folk scare. As the song “Country Boy” here tells [...]

Gram Parsons imagined a countercultural fusion of country, soul and rock ‘n’ roll he called Cosmic American Music, but ultimately his approach to making records was too haphazard and intuitive for a vision as grand and calculated as all that. Wedding the vulnerability of “Dark End Of The Street” to the stolid resolve of “Crying [...]

The cover of John Hartford’s first album for RCA had both “folk” and “country” on it, just below the label’s logo — a tangible sign of the confusion that must have reigned in the marketing department. You can almost feel the head-scratching: What is this stuff, and how the hell are we going to sell [...]

Antoine “Fats” Domino is among the most understated and underrated great musicians and performers who emerged during the era of vintage R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Domino had a pleasing, if limited, voice, and his piano technique relied heavily on triplets, two-handed fills, and elements of boogie-woogie. His delivery occasionally also revealed in his enunciation [...]

With the 1972 release Sail Away, tricky songster Randy Newman took a turn toward political satire, producing salutes to the river in Cleveland that had caught fire, the overlooked potential pleasures of thermonuclear war, the never-tasted pain of stardom, and a Top Ten list of ways that God was royally pissed off with all mankind.
The [...]