Of all the new-traditionalist acts, Dwight Yoakam was arguably the most flamboyant, with his tight-fitting designer jeans and cowboy hat. He was also the most distinctive of those to emerge on the country scene in the mid-1980s. Yoakam was born in Pikesville, Kentucky, on 23 October 1956. He was primarily raised in Columbus, Ohio, before ...
Although Bakersfield had already played host to a number of country-music artists, it was Buck Owens (1929–2006) who not only put it on the map, but also spread its name around the world. So great was his impact, some even called it ‘Buckersfield’. The Road To Bakersfield Hailing from Sherman, Texas, and born Alvis Edgar Owens ...
(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 ...
(Vocals, b. 1964) Trisha Yearwood initially moved to Nashville in 1985 to study for a degree in music management, but she ended up working as receptionist at MTM. When the label closed down in 1988, she worked singing demos and sessions. In 1991, her first single, ‘She’s In Love With The Boy’, topped the chart, ...
At least until the 1930s and 1940s the dominant themes in country music were a celebration of bedrock rural values like family, faith, fidelity and the redeeming powers of true love and honest labour. The music served as much as anything to offer listeners comfort, reassurance and a soothing sense of place and identity. But as America’s national ...
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 ...
From the urban cowboys came the neo-traditionalists, who offered a stark and welcome alternative. Their music, with its resolute devotion to earlier styles like honky-tonk, bluegrass and old-time country, bristled with the vitality and spirit of innovation that urban cowboy lacked. Emmylou Harris, a lovely, ethereal singer, came of age in the country and ...
After the 1960s heyday of the cultured Nashville sound, country music was all but swept aside. It had survived the lasting effect of 1950s rock – rock’n’roll and traditional old-timey music and bluegrass, especially – but it was now the turn of a musical hybrid, country rock, to lead the way for almost a decade. Country rock ...
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 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 ...
West-coast city Seattle was the unanticipated epicentre of 1990s music as grunge, the biggest ‘back to basics’ movement since punk, shook traditional American rock – Nirvana was to enjoy iconic status for a spell until Kurt Cobain’s death. In the UK, the dance-rock of The Stone Roses, a holdover from the late 1980s, put Manchester briefly ...
The first African slaves arrived in America in 1619 and brought their music with them. From then until the Civil War of 1861–65, the music both fascinated and frightened the white slave owners who would flock to see the black people celebrating their weekly ‘day off’ in New Orleans’s Congo Square. At the same time, slave owners suppressed the ...
Davey Johnstone (b. 1951) rocketed to fame with the Rocket Man himself, Elton John, as the former Reg Dwight exploded on to the music scene in the early 1970s, rising from thoughtful love balladeer to raucous glam rocker/showman to international pop-music institution and legend. Except for a short period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, ...
From a shy piano player, Elton John became one of the most extrovert performers of the 1970s. He has sold over 250 million records worldwide and is now almost a national institution. Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947, he won a part-time piano scholarship to London’s Royal Academy Of Music at the age of 11. By the ...
Ricky Skaggs was born on 18 July 1954, in Cordell, Kentucky, and from the age of five Skaggs and his trusty mandolin have been almost inseparable. A child prodigy, he was invited on stage to play a tune at a Bill Monroe concert at the age of six, and a year later, he appeared on ...
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