Sony/Monument, 1999 For those who wondered whether the Dixie Chicks were a flash in the pan, wonder no more. Fly surpasses Wide Open Spaces. Melding pop’s lush instrumentals with country’s emotional intensity, the Dixie Chicks craft a sound that should appeal to a wide cross-section of listeners. From honky-tonk tear-jerkers like “Hello, Mr. Heartache,” to »
Dorsey Dixon, a forty-year-old weaver then employed at the Entwistle Mill in East Rockingham, North Carolina, was tending his looms one rainy morning in the winter of 1938 when he heard the news of a deadly automobile accident on nearby U.S. Highway 1. After his shift, Dixon and another worker went to view the crumpled »
Rounder, 1999 As bluegrass looks back on fifty years of tradition, few prominent current bands hew closer to bluegrass’s roots than IIIrd Tyme Out. The group’s tight harmonies and inspired traditionalism have won widespread acclaim, and their latest release will not disappoint fans. In John and Mary they blend well-loved tunes like “Milk Cow Blues” »
Rounder, 1999 African American song has permeated the southern air for centuries. From earliest times, whites marveled at the skill with which slaves combined rhythm and work. By 1943 when this recording was originally issued, that centuries-old worksong tradition was slowly dying out. This CD preserves the vestiges of African American musical creativity designed to »
The Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, 1999; Verdant Groves Music Foundation, 1999 In 1841 a backwoods Alabama Baptist preacher named Benjamin Lloyd published a words-only hymnal adapted, as he wrote, “to singing on all occasions.” As was customary in Lloyd’s day—and in true Baptist fashion—the tunes to accompany the texts were left up to individual »
Asylum, 1999 For quite some time George Jones has blasted commercial country stations for preferring tight butts and slick packaging over proven, if older, talent. Of course he’s right, but then again he hasn’t done anything in quite some time that really stands out. Well, Shania and Garth, move over, ’cause The Possum’s back. In »
“Man, I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV,” Janis Joplin said in 1969. A little more than a year later on October 4, 1970, her superhypermost life came to a heroin- and alcohol-induced end in a Lost Angeles hotel room. She was »
University of North Carolina Press, 1999 In America’s Instrument Philip Gura and James Bollman take a fascinating look at the banjo, telling the story of how the primitive gourd instrument that was brought here by enslaved Africans captured the imagination of Victorian America. This beautiful book demonstrates how the changes of the post-Civil War marketplace »
“Even Elvis promoted himself as just a simple country boy with rural, small-town virtues.” In 1920 Warren Harding won the presidency after an early campaign speech advocating, among other things, a nostalgic and undefined return to “normalcy,” a reference to the McKinley administration of 1900 that Harding felt looked like his America. The intervening twenty years of »
“‘This old boy wanted to kill me a while back because I married his daughter, but we’re friends again now.’” I first saw Jerry Lee Lewis in the Vanderbilt University football stadium on Labor Day 1973. The opening act that night was Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Although political incorrectness was not yet in »
Columbia Legacy, 2000; Rounder, 2000; Rounder, 2000; Arhoolie, 2000 To honor the one hundredth anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s birth, Columbia’s Legacy division is launching a number of projects. The first of these is a delightful collection of Armstrong’s love songs. Six of the fifteen tracks cover the period from 1929 and 1930 when he worked »
“‘Won’t-cha come with me to Alabammy, Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy, Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy, But what the hell, it’s home.’” To succeed in the New World, Jewish songwriters adopted a southern strategy. Immigrants or the sons of immigrants, these men found their vocation in the era »