This column has always been called “Film At 11,” in part for its location here in the “back of the book.” This last edition in print feels more like “Film at Five Before Midnight.” It has been a privilege to get to use this space regularly to address a topic that never stops intriguing me, [...]

The Cowboy Junkies invited such friends as Vic Chesnutt, Natalie Merchant and Ryan Adams to Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity to help them revisit the music of an album that was seminal for so many, and which is, holy cow, marking its 20th anniversary this year. That’s what you see in Cowboy Junkies: Trinity [...]

Since the coming in the mid-’80s of regular cablecasts of parts of the weekly shows, it’s been more commonplace to see stars old and new in video performances from the Grand Ole Opry. Before that, it was a special, limited treat — but not unknown. Beginning in 1955, the Opry and several broadcast outlets (Nashville’s [...]

He’s one of the most creative, unpredictable, fun-finding, fundamentally alive personages to have graced rock, country, and (but of course) Hawaiian and polka music over the past 50 years or so, but the first chance for most people to really encounter him in his full, multifaceted human wonderment is in the film just out on [...]

“When will those Johnny Cash TV shows become available?” has probably been the question raised with me most often in my role as video columnist here. We have, at last, something of an answer in the new compilation The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show (CMV/Columbia/Legacy), which draws four hours of complete performances (as [...]

You’ve probably noticed by now that good things sometimes happen when American roots music acts and their Euro/Anglo admirers meet — face to face or in spirit. A summerload of new DVDs makes the point all over again. I was among those who’d found Springsteen’s post-folk Seeger Sessions CD a bit on the forced and [...]

For an artist with so much history under his belt, there’s been a relative paucity of original, uncut video material available capturing the electrifying performances of Jerry Lee Lewis. That a prime “What Made Milwaukee Famous” from his late-’60s hard country period was included on last year’s A Salute To Hee Haw DVD set was [...]

If you’ve ever seen any of the charged, lovable Flatt & Scruggs TV shows of the mid-1950s and ’60s any time since they aired, it must have been in occasional screenings at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, which holds 36 of them in its archives. Or maybe in much-degraded and truncated pass-around [...]

In the decades since it was broadcast in prime time, circa 1963-’64, the ABC commercial folk concert series “Hootenanny” has certainly been referred to often enough, in tones alternately nostalgic or mocking. Clearly, more people know that artists such as Dylan and Baez boycotted the show because of its continued post-’50s political blacklisting of Pete [...]

Having carefully avoided video overexposure for more than a dozen years, the proprietors of Chicago’s in-surgery country/indo-rock monolith Bloodshot have just let loose a very well-packed DVD, Bloodied But Unbowed: Bloodshot Records’ Life In The Trenches. (With its performances by both the Old 97′s and Jon Langford of “Over The Cliff”, we get a strong [...]