Can you be a rock star if the voice that is most readily comparable to yours is that of Andy Devine’s? Devine, you may recall, was the comic actor with a cracked voice who appeared in a zillion movies and […]
Can you be a rock star if the voice that is most readily comparable to yours is that of Andy Devine’s? Devine, you may recall, was the comic actor with a cracked voice who appeared in a zillion movies and […]
Gram Parsons imagined a countercultural fusion of country, soul and rock ‘n’ roll he called Cosmic American Music, but ultimately his approach to making records was too haphazard and intuitive for a vision as grand and calculated as all that. […]
Link Wray is one of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll guitar. With his fuzztone, power chords and special effects, he (along with Bo Diddley) defined the outer parameters of the instrument. But Wray was born in North Carolina and […]
Pieced together from work tapes and demos made with Jim Dickson at Sam Cooke’s World Pacific Studios in 1964, this is the most complete portrait yet of the band that would become the Byrds. Musicians and hard-core Byrd watchers have […]
The only record the Rising Sons released during their brief tenure — a single — certainly belies the band’s considerable musical legacy, or at least that of its members. Frontman Taj Mahal went on to become an ambassador for virtually […]
Many circumstances have raised questions about how wide the divide actually was between the soul music of Muscle Shoals and the country music of Nashville. Backing musicians such as Norbert Putnam and Barry Beckett belonged to both camps, as have […]
Gram Parsons gets heavy credit as one of the pioneers and true talents of country rock. In the 27 years since his death, no one has matched the beautiful fragility of his voice or his novelistic sense of country songwriting […]
Don Rich was one of country music’s great sidemen and a chief architect of the Bakersfield Sound. Born in Olympia, Washington, he was just a teenager when he began working for his mentor, Buck Owens, first as a fiddle player […]
From the late ’60s to the early ’70s, music made in the South achieved a convergence that put pop, rock, blues, soul, country and gospel all on the same page. As the key areas of Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Macon and […]
Chances are you’ve heard of Alexander “Skip” Spence, but you probably haven’t heard him. You have, actually, in a sense at least, if you own either of the first two Moby Grape albums. During his 1966-68 stint in the legendary […]
FRESH TRACK: Steven Keene – ‘This World Is Your World’Check it out
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