(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 ...
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 ...
(Vocals, mandolin, b. 1962) Vincent won six consecutive Female Vocalist Of The Year Awards (2000–05) from the IBMA for a reason. She has a high, lonesome voice reminiscent of bluegrass pioneers Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin, and she pushes it ever forward with her hard, driving mandolin riffs. After her mid-1990s fling with mainstream country, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
New-wave guitarist Bernard Sumner (b. 1956) was born in Salford, Manchester. Seeing the Sex Pistols in Manchester in June 1976 inspired Sumner and Peter Hook to acquire their first instruments, guitar and bass respectively. Originally called Warsaw, later Joy Division, they recruited drummer Stephen Morris and singer Ian Curtis for their band, making some self-produced records ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 2007–present) Florence Welch and her backing band won the prestigious Critic’s Choice Brit award in 2008. Debut album Lungs was released in July 2009, and was a slow burner; as her singles were released and her popularity grew, it gradually rose to No. 1 after 28 weeks in the charts. Her mix of soul and arty ...
Britain’s first home-grown guitar hero, Hank Marvin was born Brian Rankin in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1941. His first instruments were piano and banjo, but he switched to guitar upon discovering Buddy Holly. Marvin formed a skiffle band, The Railroaders, with school friend Bruce Welch, and they travelled to London in 1958 to compete, unsuccessfully, in ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1980–93, 1998–2007) Formed by the remaining members of Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s suicide. Bernard Sumner (guitar, vocals), Peter Hook (bass) and Stephen Morris (drums) with Gillian Gilbert (keyboards, synthesizers) added extra groove and technology to the angular post-punk beats of their former band, thus heavily influencing the ‘Madchester’ and dance music scenes of ...
(Vocal/instrumental duo, 1986–89) Frustrated by the Nashville system of the mid-1980s, Kieran Kane (b. 1949) and Jamie O’Hara (b. 1950) worked together as the O’Kanes from 1986–89, recording three fine albums. Their six Top 10 singles in less than two years included 1987’s ‘Can’t Stop My Heart From Loving You’, their only chart-topper. Disillusioned with major labels, ...
(Instrumental/vocal group, 1958–present) Formed in 1958 by Newcastle teenagers Hank B. Marvin (lead guitar) and Bruce Welch (rhythm guitar), the friends became the backbone of Cliff Richard’s backing group, The Drifters, who were joined later in 1958 by Terence ‘Jet’ Harris (bass guitar) and Tony Meehan (drums). In 1959, the group became The Shadows and continued to ...
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