“This is a song,” Kasey Chambers tells the audience at Wolf Trap, “that I wrote about all the radio stations around the world who play Britney Spears and not me.” She chuckles at her own joke. The very idea of this Australian singer-songwriter competing for airplay and audience with the Pepsi commercial icon is amusing [...]

Clarence Fountain knows just how thin the line is between gospel and rock ‘n’ roll. A word here and a word there, and a song can leap from one field to the other. He and his group, the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, were there when gospel first turned into rock ‘n’ roll. They were [...]

One morning in the summer of 1956, when Rodney Crowell was not quite six years old, his father rousted him from bed before dawn and hustled him into the back seat of a borrowed 1949 Ford. Three cane fishing poles leaned out the window of the jet-black, white-walled roadster, and with his chin resting on [...]

I’m going to write about East L.A. I’m going to write about the fruit vendors, the sewing women in the sweatshops, the smell of the tortilleria, the sounds that waft through the air on Saturdays from backyard parties, the Mexican music that was played, the dresser-top altars in Catholic homes. – Louie Perez, Los Lobos [...]

There have been approximately 111,000 rock ‘n’ roll songs written about 17-year-old girls. Their names are “Michelle”, “Maybellene”, “Sheena”, “Sherry”, “Wendy”, “Amie”, “Carrie-Ann”, “Bernadette”, “Georgy Girl”, “Gloria”, “Little Sister”, and “Ruby Tuesday”. These girls are always pretty and eager for fun. They are unencumbered by jobs, children, or any challenge more severe than algebra. They [...]

X was the American Clash. During a brief window between 1976 and 1981, when the definitions of punk rock were still up for grabs, X and the Clash took the broadest possible approach. They didn’t accept the narrow view that only the new, the angry, the fast and the hard qualified. For John Doe and [...]

Marah’s fans are not multitudinous yet, but the fans this Philadelphia group does have include some of the most respected figures in roots-rock. When Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt of Blue Mountain, for example, heard a tape of Marah’s first album-in-progress, the Mississippi couple insisted on releasing it on their own label, Black Dog Records. [...]

It was a sunny Memorial Day, and as boats cruised up the river toward the spires of Georgetown University, a stiff breeze whipped across a temporary stage, perched on an outdoor balcony overlooking the Potomac River. Phil Campbell, a portly black man in glasses and neat gray slacks, stepped to the microphone, and said, “We’d [...]

Just like St. Paul, David Ball had his life changed by a sudden revelation. Ball, though, wasn’t riding a donkey on the road to Damascus when the epiphany arrived. He was driving his car through South Carolina. “I was at a stop light on the Isle of Palms,” the singer recalls, “and Randy Travis’ ‘On [...]

In most cases, when you drain all the energy and tension from a song, you end up with easy-listening, middle-of-the-road pabulum, or perhaps pretentious, artsy twaddle. When Don Williams removes all the strain from a song, however, you get something else entirely. When Williams strips away the “look-at-me, see-how-hard-I’m-working” ego from the vocal, the song [...]