Reviews

The voices of John Cloyd Miller and Natalya Zoe Weinstein, long-time veterans of Asheville, North Carolina’s roots music scene, blend together seamlessly and soulfully on this compelling collection of mostly all original songs.  These 11 cuts range from high-lonesome honky-grass heartbreakers (“Everything But Me”) and old-timey gospel (“That Home Far Away”) to a haunting crime…

Students and aficionados of the clawhammer-style banjo will love this sparkling and captivating debut album by lifelong Baltimore resident Brad Kolodner.  Kolodner, who in the past has performed and recorded extensively with his father Ken (founder and long-time member of the group Helicon) and with Charm City, his own “old-time bluegrass fusion” band, really mixes…

The word authenticity hangs, like a heavy tree limb, over every conversation about roots music. As the umbrella of acoustic music has expanded to cover music that resembles bluegrass and folk in instrumental texture alone, many traditionalists have expressed concern over a divorce from its aural history. They posit that to pick up a banjo…

Daryl Mosley’s bluegrass credentials are impeccable. He did a long stretch as lead singer and bassist in The New Tradition and another stint with The Osborne Brothers.  As a songwriter, he’s won a slew of awards, penned at least a half-dozen number ones and had his originals covered by everyone from The Grascals and Bobby…

Trailhead Records Roots is an interesting and fun album just on the merits of spinning in the CD player.  But on closer inspection when the listener finds out it was literally created with a one-man band and that the one man—Liam Purcell—wrote all but one song (he co-wrote the other), it becomes an even more…

University of Illinois Press Don’t let the subtitle of this important book possibly turn you away. Yes, potent blends of electrified country and rock provided cornerstones for the “Americana” genre, a comparatively recent musical edifice. (The Americana Music Association wasn’t founded until 1999, and a matching Grammy Awards category had to wait another decade.)  But…