The “Dream Players” Jim Lauderdale recruited for this new set of original songs are an impressive bunch. Pioneer rockabilly guitarist James Burton — sideman for Bob Luman, Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley and Emmylou Harris — also enjoyed a distinguished Hollywood studio career. Pianist Glen Hardin and drummer Ronnie Tutt worked with Burton in Presley’s band. [...]

It’s a sign of what a big tent this music has become that two new releases by major artists should feature “bluegrass” so prominently in their titles yet sound so little alike. Time was when everyone knew what bluegrass sounded like. The instrumentation was “plinka-plunka-plinka” (like the themes from “The Beverly Hillbillies” and Deliverance), often [...]

Jim Lauderdale’s 1991 Warner Bros. debut Planet Of Love always struck me as one of that era’s most perfect albums, of the moment yet traditional, direct while remaining both imaginative and creative. In those days, the dominance of New Traditionalism was fading as the Garth juggernaut inspired Music Row to pump out some of the [...]

For a decade and a half now, fans of so-called alternative country have been waging a kind of war against the country mainstream. It has mostly been a one-sided war. While much of the small audience for alt-country despises, quite viscerally, the music of the mainstream, most fans of, say, Alan Jackson or Brooks & [...]

On the heels of his recent collaboration with Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys (Lost In The Lonesome Pines) as well as collections of honky-tonk (The Other Sessions) and roots rock (The Hummingbirds), country-bluegrass singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale further demonstrates his versatility on this set of eleven originals recorded with Donna The Buffalo. The groove-oriented [...]

Jim Lauderdale already had The Hummingbirds in the can last year when, at the last minute, he decided to go back to the studio and record an entirely new album. The result was The Other Sessions, a superb collection of tear-in-your-beer country songs. While The Hummingbirds lacks that disc’s focus, it’s no less satisfying. Contemporary [...]

Jim Lauderdale has always been a terrific songwriter and singer, but this time he’s raised the standards for himself and everyone within listening distance with a disc of hard country that walks that famous line between then and now. Lauderdale wrote or co-wrote each of the twelve tunes and sings the hell out of them [...]

That Jim Lauderdale is not more well-known is an enigma. To the mainstream Nashville community, he’s an accomplished songwriter, having written big radio hits for the likes of George Strait, Mark Chesnutt and Patty Loveless. As a performer, however, that same community considers him left of center, a dubious distinction for someone who has more [...]