Americana
Boyd Tonkin
Had he never written a note of his own, George Walker would still have left a record of trailblazing achievements. Born in Washington DC in 1922, he studied piano at Oberlin College and the Curtis Institute (the conservatoire that notoriously rejected Nina Simone). He was taught by Rudolf Serkin and, in 1945, debuted as a soloist first at the New York Town Hall and then, playing Rachmaninov’s third concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.Needless to say, neither Town Hall nor Philadelphians had ever seen an African American soloist before. By 1946, however, Walker had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s good advice. There’s plenty in the movie for cancel culture advocates to sink their teeth into – should they be so blinkered. Gallagher asserts here, as he did in his book on Ford, that the film might well have been titled Intolerance, such is its condemnation of bigotry.The Sun Shines Bright, which Ford claimed in 1968 was his favourite of his films Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On her sixth album, Basia Bulat re-records 16 of her own songs with specially created string arrangements. The Garden isn’t a best-of, more a recalibration of how the Canadian singer-songwriter sees herself through her music and how the meanings of the songs have changed.Bulat had played double bass in a chamber ensemble and has worked live with a string sections, so there’s a logic to how The Garden is arranged. Although three different string arrangers are used and there is a nod to Bartók and touches of Bernard Herrmann-esque drama, the defining characteristic is the relationship of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I didn’t even know what I was writing about. It was just sent to me”, John Mellencamp has said of Strictly A One-Eyed Jack, his first album in five years.Lauded by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Nora Guthrie, who sees in his work echoes of her father Woody, and Bruce Springsteen, who is writ large on this his 24th studio album, Mellencamp really does seem to contain multitudes. From the first notes of “I Always Lie to Strangers”, Jack’s opening track, you’re hooked, grabbed by the lapels, and happily held close. The style and mood are reminiscent of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his great late Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Disclaimer: it’s a little unfair I’m reviewing Kiefer Sutherland’s third album. He seems alright, left-ish for an American, done his time in the bad boy lane, sense of humour, tried his hand at this and that, even as a rodeo-rider, and has entertained plenty onscreen. Although I’d never heard his music until this month, I knew he’d played everywhere from the Grand Ole Opry to far-flung Glastonbury marquees. Unfortunately, the reason I’m reviewing this is I understood from all I’d read that he made whisky-soaked country. This shows you should be careful what you believe. Kiefer Sutherland Read more ...
Liz Thomson
So, it’s been another world-beating year. Known unknowns and unknown unknowns – at least two people have set Donald Rumsfeld’s 2002 Pentagon musings to music, and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding his words rather useful. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine Bob Dylan writing something similar, back in the day.Amid the hideous unknowns, amid the existential crises in which we ineluctably still find ourselves, it is inevitable that we reach out to old friends. Bob Dylan turned 80 in May (my new edition of Bob Dylan: No Direction Home by Robert Shelton, the New York Times journalist who wrote Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was sober, especially my spouse.” So runs the giggly spoken word opening line of “Harlan County Coal”, the third song on Hell of a Holiday by American country trio Pistol Annies. A semi-rock number, it insists the titular lump of combustible sedimentary rock is what the man in each of their lives will receive if he doesn’t straighten up his act.This cheerfully sassy woman-powered attitude permeates the album… well, the parts that aren’t Jesus-lovin’ or simply old fashioned Christmas cheese.Pistol Annies are big in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Irrespective of its seasonal nature, the thread running throughout O Come All Ye Faithful is a mood of contemplation which could colour any of Hiss Golden Messenger main-man M. C. Taylor’s albums. The opening cut is “Hung Fire,” a Band-esque, downtempo, soulful reflection beginning with the line “Things were bad for me, if I’m honest.” The song opens out to declare “it’s Christmas day, thank God we made it.” Next up is an interpretation of “O Come All Ye Faithful” which, arrangement-wise, is of a piece with “Hung Fire.”Three of the albums tracks are new songs by Taylor and, as well as “O Come Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jason Isbell is a bigger noise on the other side of the Atlantic than he is in the UK but his last three albums have, nonetheless, bothered the middle-regions of the British album charts. He’s built a critically lauded career with his band The 400 Unit since leaving Drive-By Truckers a decade-and-a-half ago, merging country with rock and various southern US styles. His latest is a covers album benefit for three non-profit social justice organizations, including Black Lives Matter, and is, he says, a celebration of Georgia “turning blue” (voting Democrat) in last year’s US election. Happily it Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Outlaw meets Jesus, at least on CD. The Willie Nelson Family finds The Red Headed Stranger singing some of country-gospel’s most celebrated songs, including Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light”. It’s his second album of 2021 – the first, That’s Life, released in February, was a beguiling collection of Frank Sinatra covers.Willie Nelson will turn 90 next April, and doubtless like most folks his age his thoughts turn to the day he will meet his Maker. But whatever your age, God is never far away from country music – sung about as one of the family. And that easy relationship is what gives Read more ...
Jessica Payn
How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins? For Les Tamplin, wife-beater, sheriff, father to three sons, it is a detective, deathly wind, "the wind that cannot be stopped" which stirs with the ghosts of all he’s killed, "come to steal [his] last breath". Since the Civil War, he has murdered compulsively, following "the urgent need to choke" for the relief it brings. The wind stalks him with the threat of retribution. It is lithe and fleshly, and "comes crawling at me on its belly like an infant’s slow slithering". He is Read more ...