Joe Ely tells the story of picking up a hitch hiker in West Texas forty years ago. The guy climbed in the truck and they started talking. Come to find out, the guy is a musician. Next thing you know, he opens his back pack and pulls out a handful of record albums---that have his own face on them. Ely was stunned, even though he’d been playing music out for years. “I’d never really met anybody that had actually made a record before,” he says. No, back then records were phenomena, like celestial… Continue

I rarely get gigs other than regular old singer/songwriter type things. I don’t do covers. People don’t dance to my songs. And I’ve never written anything that would be appropriate for a wedding or bar mitzvah. So it was a little unusual to get a call from Rocky Bevis last week, from Bevis Funeral Home in Wakulla County.



Rocky was doing some pro bono funeral work for a man (I will need to leave him nameless) from Mississippi who had passed away in Crawfordville, essentially homeless,… Continue

It’s sort of a running, uncomfortable joke at the annual Americana Conference in Nashville: "Now that we're here, what IS Americana music, anyhow?"



The definition I enjoyed using this year was: “Americana music is the music you don’t hear when you are scanning the radio dial.” Bittnerness becomes me.



In any event, I had almost compartmentalized the lauded and proverbial “conference experience” and moved on with my life when, in the USA Today… Continue

The Americana Conference and Music Festival got kicked off on Wednesday, as I found myself stuffed---asparagus like---into the can of the Basement, one of Nashville's most unlikely popular venues. It was all over by Sunday, when I myself sang a few songs at the Bluebird with my friend, Audrey Auld. I was exhausted from a sleepless week and TOTALLY muffed my song, “My People Come From The Dirt.” Right there on the hallowed stage of the Bluebird. Yee-haa.



It… Continue