Reviews

Bell Buckle Echo Valley is the Anderson family based in Western Pennsylvania. They are Lizzy on vocals and guitar, Emily on vocals and fiddle, Isabelle on vocals and mandolin, Olivia on vocals, banjo and fiddle, Emmaline on bass (also plays mandolin and guitar), Dolly on mandolin, and brother David on banjo.  Sister Emily is the…

Peter Rowan was working on a project during the pandemic that was supposed to be a tribute to Hank Williams and his alias, Luke the Drifter. He changed gears and the reimagined product is Calling You From My Mountain.  It’s hard to imagine that the original idea could have topped this one. Rowan wrote seven…

Shannon Slaughter offers a little bit of everything and almost everybody on his new album, Ridin’ Through the Country.  One thing is unchanged from his previous efforts, though—it is dyed-in-the-wool bluegrass to the core. There are 15 songs on the album and Slaughter wrote or co-wrote nine of them.  There is a long and impressive…

Mescalito Riding His White Horse: Insipred by The Musical Adventures of Peter Rowan is part Rowan biography, part author Mike Fiorito’s autobiography, part Peter Rowan interview, part Fiorito dream journal, part song lyric analysis, and part exploration of Buddhism.  All of that makes this book a fairly wild ride, but Fiorito is able to weave…

This ensemble from the hills of western North Carolina has a unique and exuberant groove that is, at once, musically sophisticated yet determinedly rustic. It tends to draw listeners right in. On Pretty Little Goat’s third album you can hear this distinctive sensibility on traditional numbers like “Uncle Joe/ Leather Britches” and “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” as…

Unless banjo pickers frequent  the most advanced musical circles in Nashville, they are unlikely to walk into their local bluegrass jam and find someone calling out a tune from Wes Corbett’s recently released Cascade album.  So why the need for a book notating—in painstaking detail—each of that record’s ten ambitious tracks? Corbett, a current member…