This tenth-year memorial for renowned blues musician Rainer Ptacek had many wonderful moments — warm, funny, rowdy, transcendent. But the show-stopper, the hands-down heart-warmer, was a cover of a lost Rainer song, “Blackwater Blues”. It’s one of ten just-released tracks on a CD made from tapes Rainer recorded with Das Combo twenty years ago, ten [...]

Ligonier, a rural hamlet 48 miles east of Pittsburgh surrounded by old-money country estates, might seem an odd venue for Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks a night after performing at the Bob Dylan Tribute in New York. Arranged by a local businessman and longtime Hicks fan on short notice, the concert drew less than [...]

It may come as somewhat of a surprise that the Swell Season is already packing 1,000-plus venues such as the one they played on this opening night of a three-week North American tour, given that the band — essentially the duo of Frames frontman Glen Hansard and 19-year-old Czech Republic pianist/singer Marketa Irglova — released [...]

Let’s assume not many people at the Old Town School of Folk Music’s 50th anniversary concert were in attendance at the school’s opening night: November 29, 1957.
Didn’t matter. Original Old Town teacher Frank Hamilton — who was there — gave a sense of what a folk music hootenanny was like in the Eisenhower era: banjos, [...]

“When you’ve sung a song so many times, you have to take care of it,” Neil Young explained to the capacity crowd. A fan had just wrecked Young’s concentration during “After The Gold Rush”, yelling “Neil for president!” and causing him to stop and then struggle through the rest of the song.
“If you sing a [...]