Listeners with an ear for a sweet yet powerful voice and with a good memory may recall Patty Mitchell as the singer whose talent earned her an upgrade from scratch vocalist to featured duet partner with Ralph Stanley on his award-winning Clinch Mountain Sweethearts album. Before that, she was a self-described interim member of the [...]

The latest from Detroit’s Tangerine Trousers, a sextet led by the vocal-swapping husband-and-wife team of John and CJ Milroy, offers ten distinctive cups of tea, not all of them mine. That’s nothing against the band’s general sound — sort of folk moving toward folk-rock — or their all-you-can-play buffet, which starts with guitars, double bass [...]

Texas troubadours may be the best known, but the troubadour tradition runs all along the U.S.-Mexico border, and thrives particularly in the tiny towns, villages and ranching communities that dot the Arizona borderlands. In many such communities, a single troubadour emerges as the most popular source of the traditional corridos that document the region’s tall [...]

Largely recorded at home to four-track cassette, Fantasia Ball is a trembling confession murmured to shadows, sighed from the psyche, and hummed in harmony to silence. To speak of records as therapy conjures all the wrong associations, but like the deepest therapy, the deepest music can be an utterly personal investigation.
While mostly avoiding righteous anger [...]

Though this is his solo debut, Mark Thomas Stockert is no apple-cheeked kid. He’s done time on the Minneapolis bar circuit at the helm of an outfit called Taconite Haven, and he’s served as a studio hand, most recently aiding his Eclectone label-mates Martin Devaney and Big Ditch Road. Now the somber Chatelaine Saloon outs [...]