Since Bob Dylan is arguably the best and most important songwriter of the entire rock era, it’s not surprising that his tunes show up on countless albums by other artists, including many that consist entirely of his compositions. This writer’s collection includes more than 800 Dylan covers, and while not all of them hit their […]
Singer/songwriter Buck Owens, who died in 2006, was the quintessential exponent of country music’s Bakersfield Sound, a rock-infused, back-to-basics style that burgeoned in the 1950s around Bakersfield, California. His music influenced countless artists, ranging from Dwight Yoakam, whose albums include Dwight Sings Buck, to the Beatles, who recorded a version of “Act Naturally,” Owens’s first […]
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An Anthology Collects Hits from 1960, plus San Francisco Salsa and CDs from Lance Cowan and Antonio Andrade The 20th Anniversary Billboard Chart 20th July 1960 is the latest in a series of anthologies based on the music industry magazine’s sales rankings for a particular week. Earlier compendiums have included such titles as The JFK […]
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That’ll Flat…Git It! Series Unearths More Vintage Rockabilly While the rockabilly genre owed debts to multiple earlier musical styles, it didn’t come to fruition until Sun Records released the first singles from Elvis Presley, whose pioneering work was followed by that of such labelmates as Carl Perkins. As Andrew Hickey notes in an episode of […]
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Top 25 Albums for AMA’s 25th Anniversary Year 25 years ago, spurred by conversations that took place at South by Southwest in Austin, the Americana Music Association became a reality. In September 2000, the nascent organization held its first conference in Nashville. Two years later, the Americana Honors and Awards came into being. As the […]
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An Exhaustive Rascals Box Set Stevie Van Zandt heaped a ton of praise on the Rascals when he inducted them into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. If you think he was being hyperbolic, you probably haven’t heard the group, which likely means you weren’t around in the mid and late 1960s. […]
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While music occupied most of her time since Rachel Sumner became a founding member of Boston-based genre-blending band Twisted Pine in 2014, much more weighed on the singer-songwriter’s mind by 2019. Family health issues included her own battle with the bottle. Sumner needed to address those crucial concerns as she considered what career steps to […]
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