(The Indigo Girls, Larry Campbell and Brandi Carlile) As Marty Stuart once said of the Ryman Auditorium, you can hear music in the rafters and you can feel the spirit of country music running through the building. As legend has it, Bill Monroe met Hank Williams in the Ryman dressing room and the two shook […]
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Southside Johnny — at Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ Labor Day typically marks the end of summer but some holdouts are reluctant to declare it formally over until the calendar turns on the 21st. At the Stone Pony Summer Stage, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes did their best to try and keep the […]
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Springsteen & Us In order to make sense of the present, sometimes you have to go back to the past. When The Rolling Stones wanted to charge eight dollars for their show at the Los Angeles Forum in 1969, there was considerable outrage and Rolling Stone ran the headline “The Rolling Stones Impose High Ticket […]
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When Americana Highways columnist Bill Bentley was a fledgling concert booker back in the early Eighties, he slotted an aspiring young singer named Dwight Yoakam to open up for Billy Joe Shaver. Bentley had to work some magic as Shaver, who had written virtually all of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, insisted his band back […]
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When The Rolling Stones landed in New York on the worldwide Licks tour, New York’s Madison Square Garden was a venue that they’d played numerous times and was hallowed ground for the live recording of Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out. “I hope my trousers don’t fall down,” Mick Jagger teased New York in November 1969 […]
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On a June Saturday that felt unseasonably cool and more like early fall, Bonnie Raitt looked up to the lawn seats high on the hill of those we’ve lost at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap and seemed overcome with emotion. After being shut down during the pandemic, the joy of being back onstage at […]
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(Gareth Dunlop at the Birchmere. Photos by Kelly Wosahla) The path that took Gareth Dunlop to the US and a solo set at the famed Birchmere outside Washington, DC, can be traced back twenty years ago. There in the pubs of his native Belfast he and Lee Rogers, another aspiring singer-songwriter, spent time in pubs […]
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In the opening of the new documentary Where are you Jay Bennett?, we hear the voice of the onetime Wilco member not only philosophizing but somewhat laughing about the events that led to his infamous departure. “I can understand why he wanted to have his own band,” Bennett muses in measured calm before he expounds, […]
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About that “JRE thing.” That’s how Spotify CEO Daniel Eck referred to podcast host, Joe Rogan and his show the Joe Rogan Experience and recent events that forced a new corporate policy on COVID misinformation. On Spotify’s quarterly earnings call, Eck said it was too early to know whether there would be fallout from advertisers […]
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(Dallas Frazier with Marty Stuart and Connie Smith) Long before he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame at the young age of 36, Dallas Frazier was a late depression era child who made the migration to California like many of his fellow Oklahomans. Like a real life enactment out of The Grapes […]
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