THROUGH THE LENS: 2024 In Review — The Best of Everything

While most year-end reviews are published in December, I like to spend the holidays reminiscing about the year that’s coming to a close. Only then, with music floating around the room, mingling with family and friends does is it seem that my thoughts are able to congeal and I am able to translate them into words. Thus, the first column of of 2025 is a survey of what moved me in 2024.

It has been noted several times in this column that we are in the midst of a golden age of roots music. That also includes the many reissues of albums that serve as the basis of what we take granted for today. A short list of some of those albums are also included below, more on that topic will be explored in the next Why Vinyl themed column that’s coming soon.

THE AMERICANA TEN

Sierra Ferrell – Trail Of Flowers

“Her clear passion for that old-time rootsy sound never holds her back from exploring what else she’s capable of in a wide-ranging space of country, pop, and even soul, all of which suit the loveliest creaks and rasps in her rich voice.” – Maeri Ferguson in ND 

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland

“Woodland maintains the same mix of contemplation, despair, and transcendence in which the occasional mention of hashtags doesn’t change the sense that you’re moseying through a landscape as old as music or mortality.” – Noah Berlatsky in ND 

Alice Wallace – Here I Am 

Wallace turns back the clock to the last great decade of country music, the 1980s, a time when folks like Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith could be both artistically and commercially viable. In that decade, at least half a dozen songs on this album would have been hits, starting with its opening track, “Imposter,” about the fear of being found out. I’m also a sucker for heartbreak songs, and there are several that would make even Patsy Cline envious. Notably, “I Love the Way:” “I wasn’t supposed to love you / I wasn’t supposed to fall / For everything you’ll never be / And for everything you are / But I love the way you break my heart.”

Amelia White – Love I Swore

As Henry Carrigan wrote in ND, the album “illustrates White’s lyrical ingenuity and her ability to create an emotional soundscape in which every listener can find their own struggles or heartaches or joys.” Who am I to disagree?

Jeffrey Foucault  – The Universal Fire

Captured live in a single room, with members of Calexico and Bon Iver, Foucault fuses the fire at Universal Studios that destroyed many original masters of our musical heritage with the death of his best friend, bandmate, and former Morphine drummer Billy Conway. The album is a musical wake and a meditation on the nature of beauty, mortality, and meaning.

Rebecca Frazier – Boarding Windows in Paradise

The opening track “High Country Road Trip,” gets your spirits high, toes a-tapping and sets you up for what comes after — a nourishing adventure, be it in on the highway or tripping the light fantastic around a dance floor.

The HawtThorns – Zero Gravity

The album’s title track, a sumptuous take on romantic longing sums up the album as a whole — an interstellar journey, weightless again, bewitched by all the beauty that surrounds us.

India Ramey – Baptized By The Blaze

As Rachel Cholst writes in ND, “Ramey is here to kick ass, play honky-tonk, and chew bubblegum — and she’s all out of gum.” I second that emotion. 

Kevin Gordon – The In Between

Gordon’s songs of rambling, soul searching, and introspection are without peer, and sadly don’t get the attention they deserve. The album is meditative at times, but also a rocker in the best of East Nashville traditions.

Wild Ponies – Dreamers

This album, by ND’s Spotlight Artist for August 2024, is a warm invitation to the love of the expanded family, of community, connecting the mortal with the spiritual. It’s as if they, like John Lennon, are saying, “I hope you’ll join us and the world will be as one.”

REISSUES

Reverend (“Blind”) Gary Davis – Harlem Street Singer

Admired for his rousing vocals and masterful fingerpicking, this 1960 album has long been considered Davis’ masterpiece. It touches every fiber of your being and demonstrates why the Americana Music Association honored him, and his enduring influence, with a 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s my favorite, most played record of the year.

Tony Rice – Church Street Blues

Speaking of masterful fingerpicking, you can hear the clean, precise lines of Rice’s guitar playing and revel in the warmth, tenderness, and humility of his vocals on this bluegrass album originally released in 1983. An excerpt of an article from the Winter 2023 Journal issue of No Depression that features Rice and his prized guitar can be found here.

Kelly Willis – What I Deserve

In 1999 this album hit #1 on the Americana chart and #30 on the Country chart. This expanded edition also includes previously unissued live performances of five of those songs on Mountain Stage that same year, where I was in attendance. Available on vinyl for the first time as well, lyrics and new liner notes from ND co-founder Peter Blackstock are included.

Laura Nyro – Hear My Song: The Collection 1966-1995

The monster box set this year was not Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, it was Laura Nyro who, to many of us, was their equal during her heyday. While few, if any, or her albums ever went out of print, she has become a nearly forgotten talent. Now comes this 19-CD set containing all of her regular releases, plus six discs of newly available live concerts, audition tapes, and rarities. Here’s Henry Carrigan’s review in ND. 

JAZZ (vocal) 

Catherine Russell & Sean Mason – My Ideal

There are jazz singers, there are great jazz vocalists, then there is Catherine Russell. For her ninth album, she forgoes her usual backing band and performs alone with pianist Sean Mason. Her interplay, where you distinctly hear her marvelous voice lovingly caressing the lyrics, with Mason is extraordinary. A beautiful record by my favorite vocalist.

JAZZ (instrumental) 

Abdullah Ibrahim – 3

The album contains two on stage performances in London in 2023: one live before a sold out audience, and the other on the afternoon before that show by Ibrahim and his trio. Here is what Will Friedwald, the Dean of jazz critics said about the South African pianist: “One of the most lyrical of contemporary jazzmen… the atmosphere is more like a classical concert than a jazz event; throughout, the house keeps incredibly still, like it is hanging on every note and doesn’t want to miss a single one of them.” Ibrahim was also interviewed last year on NPR’s World Café.

BLUEGRASS 

The Price Sisters – Between the Lines

From the get-go, The Price Sisters punch the throttle full bore, leaving no doubt that they are 100% steeped in the Bill Monroe bluegrass style. While most sibling bluegrass duos feature strong vocal harmonies, sisters Leanna (fiddle) and Lauren (mandolin) also specialize in their instrumental interplay. Their swagger and maturity belie their otherwise young-ish years. It’s bluegrass with heart and soul.

TRIBUTE

Various Artists – Can’t Steal My Fire: The Songs of David Olney

Legends such as Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Dave Alvin pay tribute to the one-of-a-kind troubadour David Olney. It also includes the first new recording by Willis Alan Ramsey since 1972 which just so happens to be the same year I first saw Olney, when he opened for Townes Van Zandt in Athens, Georgia. I brought him to play at my college the following year. Just call me an uber-fan. Here’s ND co-founder Grant Alden’s review. 

COVERS

Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld – Save It For Later

To call this a covers album does an injustice to Scanlan and Neufeld’s sensibilities. The songs flow so effortlessly that they seem to arise from their own river of experiences. From Beyoncé’s “XO” to The Grateful Dead’s “Bird Song,” the album has a lushness often absent from other contemporary duos. It feels like a hymnal that seamlessly melds together nature and the human spirit.

COMPILATION 

Various Artists – Live From Mountain Stage – Outlaws & Outliers

It had been some 25 years since the last Mountain Stage compilation album, and to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary they pulled out all the stops and partnered with Oh Boy Records to issue a 21 track double album featuring John Prine, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Jason Isbell, Rhiannon Giddens, Alison Krauss, Tyler Childers, and Sierra Ferrell, and way more.  Wow!

EP

Bella White – Five for Silver

This is not your run-of-the-mill collection of covers as White demonstrates how in-tune she is with the great writers that came before her. Her phrasing of a lyric is similar to that of Townes Van Zandt, that short hesitation, holding a note half a beat longer than expected. Imperceptible at first, but once noted it’s a mark of genius.

SINGLE

Rachel Brooke – The One Who Got Away

Brooke, whom I’ve called the Queen of Honky-Tonk, turns the one-who-got-away theme on its head. Yes, it’s a sitting-on-a-bar-stool tear-jerker, but the “one who got away” turns out to be the protagonist herself. Complete with pedal steel, it’s country gold.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Chess Records Tribute Channel – Established in 1950 Chess Records was the blues label, recording Muddy Waters, Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry and so many more. The channel, launched in January 2024, is a deep excursion into the label’s history, featuring hundreds of rare videos. Constantly updated, the channel also includes vintage soul, jazz, gospel, and rock & roll videos, along with newly produced ones. So far, there have been over 500 videos, 70 exclusive podcasts, and quite a few playlists uploaded. An absolute must for any roots music fan. 

Click on any photo below to view the gallery as a full-size slideshow.