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 ...
Country music has been euphemistically called ‘white man’s blues’ or ‘the poetry of the common man’. While both descriptions have elements of truth, neither is quite accurate. It is, in fact, a broad, nebulous, over-reaching category with no exact boundaries or parameters. Over the decades country music has grown to encompass a greatly varied assortment of ...
(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 ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1989–present) Nickel Creek gave a youthful jolt to the bluegrass scene when the charismatic, virtuosic group released its Alison Krauss-produced, eponymous 2000 debut album before half the quartet had turned 20. The band formed in 1989 when Chris Thile (vocals, mandolin, b. 1981) met the siblings Sara Watkins (vocals, fiddle, b. 1981) ...
Bill Monroe invented the ‘high, lonesome’ sound of bluegrass vocals, but The Stanley Brothers perfected it. Ralph and Carter Stanley refined those vocals into close, three-part harmonies that were unprecedented at the time and which have had a lasting influence ever since. If Bill Monroe And The Blue Grass Boys set the standard for bluegrass picking, The ...
There have always been avant-garde artists and bands that take elements of country and fuse them with other musical idioms to make their own highly original, often idiosyncratic styles. Many of these artists also address controversial issues that are taboo in the politically correct country mainstream. It was the late-1960s and early 1970s, when America’s anti-war ‘alternative’ sub-culture was ...
Unlike practically any other strain of indigenous American music, bluegrass can be traced back to a particular time and a particular group of men: Kentucky-born mandolin player/bandleader Bill Monroe and a select handful of musicians he gathered in his band, The Bluegrass Boys. Monroe and the celebrated 1940s vintage line-up of The Bluegrass Boys first transformed traditional acoustic guitar-fiddle-bass-fiddle ...
It may not fit into the purists’ ideal, but contemporary song has long been an essential element of folk music. The art of the singer-songwriter, from Woody Guthrie through to Bob Dylan, and a whole host of artists who emerged in their wake, fuelled much of the early folk revival. Today’s singer-songwriters borrow heavily from many disparate ...
In 1996, the Californian singer Gillian Welch released her debut album, Revival. Her unassuming, folksy songs and plaintive, old-time singing could have come straight out of the Appalachians at any time in the last hundred years. With guitarist David Rawlings, Welch came to pinpoint and define a new style of folk music: the neo-traditional performer. Welch personified ...
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 ...
When Steve Earle (b. 1955) was released from prison on 16 November 1994, it had been four years since he had released a studio album and three years since he’d done a tour. During that time lost to heroin and crack, much had changed in the world of country music. The charismatic but mainstream-pop-oriented Garth Brooks (b. 1962) was ...
New country took many years and miles of travel before its current evolution – not least the new traditionalist movement of the 1980s, which returned country music to its roots. Garth Brooks (b. 1962) did it far more quickly, but that’s a different story. Sometimes it seemed like these artists were chipping away at a mountain with nothing more ...
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 ...
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band started out in 1966 as a student jug band in Los Angeles, and in an early incarnation it included a teenage Jackson Browne. Among the group’s founder members was singer and guitarist Jeff Hanna. Both Hanna and multi-instrumentalist Jimmie Fadden are still Dirt Band members 40 years on. The extremely ambitious Will The Circle Be ...
Strauss’s final opera marked a belated return to form. He had suffered since the end of his collaboration with Hofmannsthal and jettisoned his original librettist, Joseph Gregor, in favour of the conductor Clemens Krauss. The conception was a simple but subtle one in which the characters in the piece decide to write an opera. Only at the end is ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.