The most influential country act of 2001 was a band that didn’t even exist. The Soggy Bottom Boys were the prime attraction on O Brother, Where Art Thou? the soundtrack album that topped the country and pop charts and sold more than four million copies. The group revived the late 1930s and early 1940s sound when old-time string-band music was morphing into bluegrass, but did so with a modern, whoop-it-up ...
Hank Williams and George Jones would have found the whole notion of alt-country unfathomable. Why would anyone seek an alternative to bestselling country records? For these sons of dire southern poverty, the whole point of making country records was to sell as many as possible and maybe catch hold of the dignity and comfort that a middle-class life might afford. In fact, it was the hunger for such success that ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1951) Escovedo had played in the country-rock bands Rank And File and The True Believers, but his 1992 solo debut album Gravity unveiled an unexpected talent pursuing an unprecedented sound. Using acoustic guitar, steel guitar and cello to create the quiet intimacy of chamber music, his brooding original songs blended alt.-country, Mexican folk music and punk-rock with arresting results. He pursued this distinctive blend, both in small combos ...
In 1995, Alison Krauss (vocals, fiddle, b. 1971) achieved a level of success no other bluegrass act had ever matched. Her 1995 retrospective album, Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection, went double platinum, and she won the CMA Awards for Single, Female Vocalist, Vocal Event and Emerging Artist as well as the Grammy Awards for Best Female Country Vocal and Best Country Collaboration With Vocals. If ever there was ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1990s) Blood Oranges never sold many records, but they made two terrific albums (1990’s Corn River and 1994’s The Crying Tree) thanks to some smart songwriting, a savvy mix of bluegrass and British folk-rock and the contrast between fizzy male vocals and melancholy female vocals. The band was founded by Jimmy Ryan (vocals, mandolin, b. 1959), guitarist Mark Spencer and Cheri Knight in Boston in 1987, but drifted apart ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1952) Miller is short and stocky, just like Buck Owens, and applies a similar thick hillbilly twang to similar down-to-earth, hard-country songs. Julie Miller (vocals, b. 1956) is as tall and willowy as Joni Mitchell, and writes the same sort of poetic, folk-rock songs for the same sort of reedy soprano. They make an unlikely couple, but even when they release solo albums, they help each other out ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1955) Dave Alvin did most of the Springsteen-like songwriting and his brother Phil Alvin (vocals, guitar, b. 1953) did all the lead singing for The Blasters, one of the best roots-rock bands of the ’80s. Dave left to join X and then left that band for a solo career that increasingly emphasized the country side of his influences. His song about Hank Williams’ last ride, ‘Long White Cadillac’, ...
(Mandolin, b. 1945) Grisman was a city kid from New York who fell so deeply in love with the bluegrass music of Bill Monroe that he devoted himself to mastering his repertoire and his instrument, the mandolin. Grisman produced a record by his bluegrass heroes Frank Wakefield and Red Allen in 1963 and joined their band in 1966. But the same curiosity that led him from Manhattan streets to Carolina hills ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1967) Gillian Welch met David Rawlings at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, where most of their classmates were studying jazz and classical music. Welch and Rawlings were drawn instead to lyric-heavy songwriting and concluded that Appalachian string-band music would be the best vehicle for those songs. It was a foreign tradition for them, but they mastered it, settled in Nashville, founded their own record company and released a ...
(Vocals, guitar, piano, b. 1961) Iris was the youngest of 14 children in Paragould, Arkansas, and she grew up singing gospel and hillbilly songs in a loud, nasal voice. In 1987 she started writing smart, sharply sketched songs and sang them in her undiluted twang on 1992’s Infamous Angel and 1994’s My Life. Merle Haggard declared her the best singer he had heard in years, and she joined his band as ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1958) Ringenberg is perhaps the only alt.-country performer who actually grew up on a farm (his daddy raised pigs in Illinois) and that background lent a rural authenticity to his music, whether it was his Dylanesque solo projects or the revved-up rockabilly group, Jason And The Scorchers. That band came together in Nashville in 1981 and recorded three major-label albums. Styles & Forms | Alt. Country & The Bluegrass ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1985–present) The Jayhawks grew out of the same Minneapolis scene that produced Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, but the rock band led by Gary Louris (vocals, guitar, b. 1959) and Mark Olson (vocals, guitar, b. 1961) turned in a folkier, more country direction in reaction to their neighbours. After two small-label albums and two big-label albums gave them a high profile in the alt.-country world and a low profile ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1957) Lauderdale pays his bills by writing hook-laden hits for mainstream-country performers such as George Strait, The Dixie Chicks, Vince Gill and Mark Chesnutt, but his own recordings reflect a penchant for traditional country and a quirky sense of humour that land him in the alt.-country category. He grew up in South Carolina, obsessed with bluegrass, and eventually recorded two albums with his hero, Ralph Stanley. Lauderdale’s songs ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1959) Graham was, like Alejandro Escovedo, an alumnus of The True Believers, who found in alt.-country an effective catalyst for fusing his Mexican-American childhood and his punk-rock youth. With a rumbling baritone not unlike Tom Waits’, Graham wrote haunting songs about real despair and possible redemption on such albums as 2002’s Hooray For The Moon and 2004’s The Great Battle. Graham was also a member of the legendary ...
It makes sense that Australia would be the one country outside North America to develop an important country-music scene of its own. Like the USA and Canada, Australia had a large, under-populated frontier that was settled by English, Irish and Scotch immigrants who brought their folk songs with them. Roughened and toughened by frontier life, those songs became country music. Australia lacked the African, German and Mexican influences that shaped ...
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