Today’s country artists aren’t rednecks, they just play them on TV. Twenty years ago was another matter. Moe & Joe, those were rednecks. Mickey Gilley was urbane in comparison, but he ran the world’s biggest honky-tonk, too. For better, for worse, they were the real thing.
The Ultimate Moe & Joe collects all the singles (plus [...]

This is the sound of hard-core country in the 1960s — not necessarily that of the greatest artists, but the everyday, keep-it-country sound that filled the middle of the charts.
Charlie Walker hailed from farming country east of Dallas and was a popular San Antonio DJ for years before hitting the top 10 for the first [...]

Although much less broad in scope and goal and coming from a different perspective, the Country Got Soul compilation has an against-the-grain mission statement similar to that of 1998’s three-disc From Where I Stand: The Black Experience In Country Music box set. Whereas From Where I Stand spotlighted the role of blacks in a genre [...]

As with most major artists, the lion’s share of Neil Young’s Reprise catalog was converted to CD in the late 1980s, digital’s frontier days, with little consideration given to sound quality, presentation or artistic intent. At the time, not much was made of the six unreleased titles: the four above-mentioned, as well as the essential [...]

It’s been ten long years since the release of The Stanley Brothers: The Early Starday King Years 1958-1961, and though the delay has been aggravating (to say the least), it’s a blessing to finally have its 4-CD companion set available. For one thing, virtually all of the commercial recordings of the Brothers are now in [...]

The mention of Glen Campbell is likely to evoke either a shrug or a snicker. For those under 20, he doesn’t exist, and to 40-year-olds, he endures largely as a caricature: clad in a white leisure suit, waving his good-guy white hat from atop a horse on the Rhinestone Cowboy album cover. Like most views [...]

When released in 1976, Waylon Live instantly joined the short list of great country concert recordings, alongside Hank Thompson’s At the Golden Nugget, Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison, Charley Pride’s In Person (Live At Panther Hall), and not very many others. But what we have here — a new two-disc, 42-track version of the album [...]