The last few days in the rush to deadline are always hectic. There’s far too much to do in too little time, and the candle gets burnt at both ends…but, truth be told, that’s also what has always made this work exhilarating, dating way back to my daily-newspaper days. There is a special thrill, watching [...]

She may be mythic to some, but Anna Lee Amsden also makes a tasty fried cornbread. She is serving it to hungry music fans in Woodstock, N.Y., one late Saturday night in early September as Levon Helm, her friend of 60-plus years, is gearing to perform just up the stairs. Remove her last name and [...]

We’ve been bombarded for months — years even — with all the gloom-and-doom that surrounds the music industry in the 21st century. The word has become a ceaseless mantra: CDs are dead. Downloads were a giant asteroid that will demolish the music business as we know it. The iPod has made CDs little more than [...]

On December 7, 1967, Otis Redding, with the help of guitarist-producer Steve Cropper, finished recording “Dock Of The Bay” at Stax Records in Memphis. From Memphis, Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, departed for performances in Nashville and Cleveland, and, from there, a headliner show booked at the Factory in Madison, Wisconsin. Redding had just [...]

“After my brother was killed, it was easy for me to think that the world was an awful place,” says singer-songwriter Kristy Kruger. “I needed to know that the world is full of wonderful people, and that’s what I’m finding out.” Kruger, who grew up in Dallas but now resides in Los Angeles, is in [...]

Anecdote #1, as detailed by label founder Barry Poss in the liner notes of the recent box set Sugar Hill Records: A Retrospective: “James McMurtry’s manager was on the line, asking if we’d be interested in working with his client.…It was arranged that I would meet James for dinner prior to an upcoming gig in [...]

“She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in the short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. The nearness of death brought the story’s grandmother to a moment when she was the person she wanted to be. [...]

In 1971, CBS executive Fred Silverman made headlines with what became known as his “Rural Purge” when he canceled nine television shows (including The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry RFD, and Green Acres) — not because they weren’t successful, but because they skewed to a rural audience, which Silverman apparently deemed undesirable. The bigwig said he was [...]

Until her records were finally reissued on CD this summer, there were essentially only two ways to hear Ronee Blakley’s music: a) hunt down the original LPs, or b) watch the movie Nashville. Which was astonishing, not only because Blakley’s voice — as a vocalist and songwriter — still sounds fresh after 30-odd years, but [...]