The 9513 - Country Music Blog

Gospel/country hybrid album Take The High Road doesn’t waste any time cutting to the chase. The sheer joy and enthusiasm that permeates every nook and cranny of The Blind Boys of Alabama’s new album launches full-throttle in its opening seconds, seamlessly combining a breathless, preaching testimony, crisply powerful harmonies and an instrumental backing that could [...]

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Bluegrass and Dixieland jazz may, upon first glance, seem rather different from one another, but they do have several common traits, such as a shared love of improvisation. In addition, as their names suggest, both genres grew out of specific regions and remain linked to those regions and their people. These shared characteristics are part [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Del McCoury Band & Preservation Hall Jazz Band – American Legacies"

Your enjoyment of Aaron Lewis’ EP, Town Line, is directly proportional to how much you enjoy his debut country single, “Country Boy.” If you loved the down-home, don’t-tread-on-me sentiments, then are you ever in luck, because the song shows up three times on a seven-track album. If you thought it was a pandering, turgid tune [...]

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Between his actress wife, family ties to a country superstar du jour and pop music background, it’s easy to be a little suspicious of Josh Kelley’s stab at a career comeback via country music. Kelley, married to Katherine Heigl and brother to Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley, saw a short-lived run up the Hot Adult Top [...]

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The tenth time’s the charm for Eric and Leigh Gibson. The brothers–and their talented band–keep outdoing themselves with each successive record. Their latest, Help My Brother, features the best harmonies in the business (sorry, Dailey and Vincent), and they’ve never sounded better together than they do on these dozen tracks. Some of the brothers’ finest [...]

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The song “Lost Highway” has a very special place in Hank Williams’ canon. Recorded shortly before his death in 1953, it remains one of his best and most worried songs, a bleak evocation of dark sin and bright redemption rendered in plainspoken poetry. That Williams died in the backseat of his car only makes the [...]

Continue reading "Ten Definitive Albums that Mark Lost Highway’s Past Decade"

The press for San Francisco’s Jesse Brewster hypes him as an alt-country outlaw — terms that are frequently thrown around for some fairly marginal performers. Fortunately, unlike the clutch of singers that just want to extol the virtues of whiskey and smoke, there is little of either on his sophomore release, Wrecking Ball at the [...]

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Lucinda Williams, one of the great American artists of her time, finally seems willing to be consoled. On her eighth studio album, Blessed, she devotes her energy to getting all the anger out of her system. The result is a milestone in an already matchless repertoire. Working with Don Was and Little Honey producer Eric [...]

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Banjo player Joe Mullins has bluegrass in the blood. Radio, too–he’s the son of the late disc jockey/fiddler Paul “Moon” Mullins, who was one of the Stanley Brothers’ Clinch Mountain Boys, performed with his son in the Traditional Grass, and spent over four decades as a broadcaster in Southwest Ohio. The younger Mullins, who recently [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Joe Mullins & The Radio Ramblers – Hymns From the Hills"

A country rock quintet from Dallas, Eleven Hundred Springs has issued 11 albums since their 1998 debut. On Eight the Hard Way, the band showcases their winning blend of country shuffles and Western swing hoedowns. Lead vocalist Matt Hillyer’s wistful singing lends a bittersweet feeling to these songs about dark bars and broken hearts. His [...]

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