Sure we could talk about Nancy Reagan's death, but it's more important to note that Bob Wills would have been 111 today.
country music
In the 1970s, James Brown and Porter Wagoner became friends. Wagoner was of course a major player in country music and so he managed to schedule the Godfather of Soul.
In 1975, Charlie Rich presented the Country Music Awards Performer of the Year Award. After very slowly reading the nominees, he opened the envelope, saw it was John Denver, pulled.
In the stories we tell about music and the South during the 1960s and 1970s, a common theme is that music was the place where race didn't count, where white and black musicians could play together on an equal basis, be friends, have a few...
Above: Oum Khaltoum This is a great read taking you on a tour of the first recorded music from spots around the world in the mid to late 1920s. Well.
Above: Not the middle class The state of mainstream country music is, to say the least, a mixed bag. The Nashville radio formula that has dominated the art form for.
How could the nation have survived such a horrible outcome? It’s a good thing for pop music, honky-tonk feminism, and Canadian tax collectors that McDonald’s pays lousy wages. If the food stores paid their frontline workers enough to survive on, Shania Twain would still be...
The purveyors of bro-country (I prefer douche country myself) are real sensitive to women criticizing their idiotic and terrible songs. I hope those guys are giving each other manly bro-hugs.
No band in America makes people with decent taste want to punch themselves in the face like Florida Georgia Line, the Nickelback of country music. Exhibit A: Ebola causes you.
This Rolling Stone profile of Willie Nelson is pretty great, even if magazines should not refer to their own work as "definitive," which is the equivalent of talking about your own integrity since evidently we can just judge ourselves objectively these days. Willie is a...
If it was up to me, the National Park Service would take over the boxcar turned house where Merle Haggard grew up and run it as a National Historic Site,.
A very special treat for everyone tonight. Of all the right-wing anti-hippie country songs from the late 60s and early 70s, none, and I mean none, reach the magisterial bizarre.