When Guy Clark wanted to record “Picasso’s Mandolin” in 1992, he knew just what to cast in the title role — the 1937 Gibson F-5 belonging to Sam Bush, the world’s foremost cubist mandolinist. Who else was he going to pick? David Grisman, after all, is a fauvist, Ricky Skaggs an impressionist, Bill Monroe an [...]

In 1992, Mark O’Connor was the most successful fiddler in country music. But it wasn’t enough. The Seattle native, then 31 years old, had just won the Best Country Instrumental Grammy Award for The New Nashville Cats, an all-instrumental album with such friends as Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Russ [...]

The first song on Don Rigsby’s new solo album, The Midnight Call, describes a man who goes looking for his girlfriend only to find her lying dead on a hospital table. In the second song, a man gets a phone call from his dead mother. The third takes place in a divorce court; the fourth [...]

In the winter of 1987-88, Lyle Lovett faced some tricky decisions. His first two albums had yielded five top-25 country singles (and would yield two more in the year to come). True, none of those singles had risen above #10, but still it was an impressive start, especially for such an unconventional artist who was [...]

Some musicians play so loud, so fast, so hard that they test the boundaries between music and noise. The clumsy ones lose control and collapse into incoherence, but the agile ones — say, the Velvet Underground, Hüsker Dü, R.L. Burnside and late Coltrane — constantly threaten that collapse without ever allowing it, and with that [...]

When people talk about alternative-country, they usually mean country music that’s been influenced by rock ‘n’ roll. Similarly, when folks use the term jazz-fusion, they usually mean jazz that borrows from rock. But there’s another kind of alternative-country and another kind of jazz-fusion that bring together American rural music and improvisation — and this country-jazz [...]

Guy Clark lives on a quiet cul de sac in West Nashville. There’s a garden out front, woods out back, and the lot slopes so the basement looks out on the trees. Clark and his wife Susanna, a fine songwriter herself, live on the first floor, but Guy works in the basement. And it’s there [...]

A voice we thought we would never hear again has unexpectedly returned. In 1987, Linda Thompson was recording a country album for Columbia Nashville with Herb Pedersen producing and David Lindley and David Grisman playing the session. It was meant to be the follow-up to her 1985 solo debut, the critically praised though poor-selling One [...]

Garrison Keillor doesn’t often smile in public. He can’t afford to, for deadpan drollness is crucial to his Lake Wobegon monologues. But when he sings with Robin & Linda Williams, he can’t help it. He beams like a lantern. I’m thinking in particular of a February night in 1990 when Keillor, the Williamses and Kate [...]