Me and Richard Thompson Love Marissa Nadler

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

Seven years ago, just before Marissa Nadler’s 30th birthday, I watched a simple homemade video that was uploaded to Couch By Couch West, the online fest alternative to SXSW that launched in 2011 and sadly faded away after five years. The fingerstyle guitar and upper-register vocals really struck me as being familiar, yet it took me several days to realize that not only did I know Nadler’s music, but I actually had a whole bunch of her songs already sitting in my digital library. Some were downloaded from her website and Bandcamp page, others came from music nerds and weird old men from faraway places who file-shared late into the night and wrote things about her like this:

“Marissa Nadler could be a damsel who has tumbled from a frayed tapestry in search of her unicorn, a crystal doll who has escaped from her vitrine, or a tubercular maid who has slipped out of her Victorian deathbed photograph to traipse this earthly plane.”

“Part of me wishes she’d use her siren’s call to unite Sisters of the Moon in a woodland super-group of nymphs and urban wood-sprites.”

“She’s like a young Stevie Nicks, all doped up and duped to serve as Devendra Banhart’s geisha. Nah, too strong for that. How ’bout Donovan reincarnated as Linda Ronstadt? Except instead of a ’70s pop star, in this life she’s Fairy Queen of the Muir Woods, a mythical creature spotted only by hippie chicks who dare to eat strange mushrooms and venture into the redwoods past nightfall.”

Baby, I Will Leave In The Morning, May 2011

Throughout Nadler’s music career, which formally began in 2004 with the release of Ballads of Living and Dying, attempting to explain what sort of music she makes by putting a genre Post-it note on her is the equivalent of herding kittens hyped up on catnip. I tried my best to do it with a No Depression feature article that I published in 2011 titled “The Demystification of Marissa Nadler.”

After gently and courteously stalking her through social media and email, we put together an interview that introduced her to y’all bunch of alt-country hillbillies, aging cowpunks, and Americanarama-ites. And if you could get past the image of a Goth princess in heavy makeup with long flowing dresses who played freak-folk acoustic guitar with effect pedals and sang through layers of reverb as she opened late-night shows for metal bands, you might get as platonically smitten as I was and respect her work as an artist and musician.

Firecrackers, June 2014

This was my take on Nadler back then:

“She is not living in the land of unicorns and dragon slayers, her music is not all incense and peppermints, and it sits neatly on the shelf with artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Emmylou Harris to Vashti Bunyan. There is a lot of talent, strength,and intelligence in this woman, and although I’ll admit that I fell for the image at first, it offers great satisfaction for me to help assist in the demystification of Marissa for you and bring it all back to Mother Earth.”

All The Colors of The Dark, February 2016

Today, at age 37, Nadler is married, still lives in the Boston area where she was raised, is an accomplished illustrator and artist, has toured all over the world while developing an adoring fan base, and has just released her eighth studio album, For My Crimes. It’s a more stripped-down album compared to some of her past work that nevertheless feels lush with a brilliantly executed production and mix. The songs are mostly guitar-centric with harmonies from Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Kristin Kontrol. Here’s Nadler’s description of her songs, which she shared with Jeff Terich at San Diego City Beat:

“They’re written from personal experience, but I think it’s a good thing if people think they feel they’re more like character sketches. I really believe in the power of people to connect with music like that. I was very much writing a personal album—pretty confessional songwriting for me, I guess. I don’t put people’s names in songs, though. It gets pretty tricky when art and life collide. It’s a very hard record for me to talk about because the songs are so personal, and I want to make sure not to cause any fires that I can’t put out.”

Blue Vapor, August 2018

Several days after the Sept. 28, 2018 release of For My Crimes, I sent Nadler a link to an article from The Quietus, an English music and pop culture site “for people aged 10 to 73.” They have an ongoing feature called “Bakers Dozen” in which they ask people to list their favorite albums, and Richard Thompson just published his. Along with Moby Grape, Crowded House, Offa Rex, Squeeze, The Watersons, The Left Banke, and others was Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird On The Water from 2007, which was nominated as Best Americana Record of the Year at the 2007 PLUG Awards. Here’s what Thompson wrote:

“My youngest son, Jack, introduced me to Marissa Nadler. Her music is really strange, lovely stuff. I think it’s a little bit linked to shoegazing, or that sound, although I don’t know a lot about that. I find it very mesmerising and very dreamy, especially the way she harmonises with herself. I’m also never quite sure what she’s talking about – there’s lots of ambiguity in her lyrics, which I like. Songs and stories don’t always have to be straight.”

Within minutes of getting my message she replied “Insane!!! I’ll have to send him my new one! He’d probably like it if he liked that one.” I complimented her on all the press she has been getting on the new record. There’ve been articles and interviews from Rolling Stone, SPIN, Paste, Revolver Magazine, Consequence of Sound, Red Bull, and now, No Depression. She used to read ND back in high school and has covered songs by Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen. On her new album there’s a song about listening – or rather not listening – to Gene Clark from the Byrds. She’spends a lot of time on tour in the US and abroad, so check out her site for dates.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Film About Blaze Foley That You Didn’t See

Blaze Promo Photo/blazefoleymovie.com

Up until this past January I doubt that I’ve actually sat in a movie theater more than dozen times in the past six years. It’s not because I don’t enjoy watching films, but here in New York where tickets are usually around $15, I’m required to hop onto a train and subway to get into the city and it ends up blowing up my budget when you throw in lunch or dinner at the Saigon Shack on MacDougal and a side trip to The Strand for book shopping.

I tend to get my film fix on my 60-inch screen, using Netflix, Amazon Prime, or one of the premium cable channels. Earlier this year that changed with MoviePass, the $9.99-per-month subscription service that allowed me to go out and catch a different show 30 times in 30 days. It was hardly a surprise that this was not a sustainable business model, and this summer the company crashed, burned, and resurrected itself on life support, now offering only three hand-picked films per month. But for a good six months I devoured every big budget, indie, and foreign film I could possibly see, and I’m proud to say that not once have I succumbed to the concession stand.

On the first day of its release in the city a few weeks ago, I went to see Blaze, the biopic on the life of Mr. Foley that was brought to the screen by Ethan Hawke, who both directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with Sybil Rosen, whose memoir was the basis for this biopic. In the film she is portrayed by Alia Shawkat, the love interest in film parlance, while Ben Dickey – a musician with no previous acting experience – sparkles and shines as Foley. His performance is so strong that I’d be surprised if he doesn’t get nominated for some award or another. Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt, a friend and alcohol-fueled co-conspirator/prankster of Foley, acts as a narrator of sorts, conversing with interviewer Hawke, who remains offscreen, as Josh Hamilton, playing a composite musician by the name of Zee, sits uncomfortably and listens to what amounts to a bunch of tall tales. You also have a few interesting cameos such Kris Kristofferson, Gurf Morlix, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra.

If you’re a country or roots music fan, whether you’re a longtime listener or new to Foley’s music, Ben Dickey’s live performances are so personal and spot-on that it might be difficult for some to separate the actor from the subject. And the story line, an odd duck country singer-songwriter whose relationship and music career are derailed by bad luck and bad choices, ends tragically. Because I have no knowledge or skill sets when it comes to writing a film review or critique, all I can add is that I simply loved it and at the end I just wanted to stay and watch it again. To be honest, the only reason for this week’s column is because I’ve yet to see a mention of it on the No Depression site and frankly, that makes no sense.

It was No Depression‘s co-founder Peter Blackstock who first introduced me to the name Blaze Foley when he mentioned him with reverence almost 20 years ago in the original periodical. In September 2006 (issue #65) they published what is likely the definitive and best article ever written on Foley. Joe Nick Patoski is the author of The Fall and Rise of Blaze Foley,and although the print version may have faded over time, the story remains available to read right here on this website (click the title to get you there). One note of caution and sorrow: when No Depression migrated the original website to the current platform, the formatting was lost. But try not to let the giant word jumble deter you, as it’s a great article written by one of the best. It reminds you why the original No Depression magazine was so relevant and vital to the times.

Since you might have been expecting to read an actual review, I don’t want to disappoint. So I’ll drop in a couple of excerpts from other publications, and mention that this is a “small film,” which means at present it’s only been shown at film festivals and distributed to 43 theaters. Pulling in less than half a million dollars this month, it’s destined to make its journey to the world of streaming. Don’t miss it. Perhaps it’ll become a cult classic, an Americana musical, sort of like what Rocky Horror Picture Showdid for fishnet stockings and toast.

“Maybe it’s a stretch to make a biopic about a singer best known for a song another singer wrote about him. Or maybe that’s what biopics are for: to throw light onto figures who’ve been unfairly cast in the shadows. The better biopics, anyway, and Ethan Hawke’s ‘Blaze’ is one of them, even if a listen to Blaze Foley’s music hints at much that Hawke doesn’t quite capture about the man. Ben Dickey, an Arkansas-born rocker, plays the title character and matches Foley in bearlike heft and wayward eccentricity; the performance won a special jury award at Sundance this year.”
— Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“The great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt used to say there are two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Both are on full, florid display in ‘Blaze,’ an absorbing, illuminating film about the late musician Blaze Foley. With his bearlike physicality and unstudied air of emotional honesty and vulnerability, Ben Dickey commands the screen from start to finish in ‘Blaze,’ making even the film’s most self-pitying asides not just tolerable but also full of genuine regret.”
— Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

“Cinematographer Steve Cosens frames shots in ways that seem loose but capture both the grain of a place and its aura, how it seeps into people. Throughout the film, Hawke keeps returning to Foley’s last show at Austin’s legendary Outhouse bar, where he’s at the end of his tether but not — even whiskey-addled — his talent.

“Hawke’s syntax — the jumps from the Austin Outhouse concert to Van Zandt’s radio interview to life in the tree house and back — muddles the momentum. He even inexplicably jumps forward and back withinscenes. He’s like a film student fiddling around in the editing room, and he makes a hash of the events leading up to Foley’s violent death … for all his silly directorial stutter steps: he makes you believe in the power of music to summon ghosts.”
— David Edelstein, NPR

Outside of the film trailer at the beginning of the column, all of the video clips here are Blaze Foley and not Ben Dickey. They come from a variety of sources, and I’d be remiss to post this without acknowledging a previous film documentary produced and directed by Kevin Tripplet. Shot over an almost ten-year period, Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah was shown via non-traditional theatrical exhibition with Gurf Morlix in 2011. (It had an early showing at SXSW in 2009.) The DVD is available for purchase at Lost Art Records, which also is home to the six Foley albums that are in print. You can find Morlix’s tribute album, Blaze Foley’s 113thWet Dream, on his website and read an interview with him about the film and his album back from 2011 in The Austin Chronicle.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

A Tribute to Side One Of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

Photo by Easy Ed

Barring any storm, fire,earthquake, malaria outbreak, tooth impaction, gall bladder attack, transit strike, fall, cut, bruise, forgetfulness, or worse, by the time you read this I’ll likely have had the pleasure of attending the Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman reunion concert, backed by Marty Stuart and The Fabulous Superlatives. It is the 50th anniversary of The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, one of several albums of the 1960s that assisted with the infusion of country music into the minds of baby boomer rockers and several generations thereafter. The month happens to coincide with another anniversary of sorts: Gram Parsons, who with the help of Chris Hillman brought the concept for the album to the band in 1968, passed away on Sept. 19, 1973.

I could easily cut, paste, and re-juggle the incredibly large volume of words already written about this album (the Wikipedia page is incredibly detailed), but I thought perhaps there might be another way to acknowledge the impact and importance that it has had over time. When Sweetheart was first released, it really didn’t resonate with most music fans of the day, who looked upon the group as the “American Beatles” with their string of jingle-jangle top 40 hit singles. But for those of us city folk who were enchanted with both the cowboy iconography and Nashville honky-tonk instrumentation, it was the game changer.

In a recent interview with Rock Cellar magazine, McGuinn talked to Jeff Slate about the album and tour:

“My wife and I were in an airport in Buenos Aires, waiting to get on a plane,” McGuinn says. “We remembered that it was the 50th anniversary of the album, and we were thinking about Chris Hillman, he’d had a tough year because his house was damaged in the fires in California last year, and Tom (Petty) had died, just after finishing Chris’ album with him, and so I said, ‘Man, let’s do something to cheer up Chris!’

“I think we were doing country music even before Gram was,” McGuinn points out, referring to Gram Parsons, who had just joined the Byrds at the time the band headed for Nashville, and who is often credited as the godfather of the country-rock genre. “He’d been through a Kingston Trio phase, and all the same things I’d been into. He was turned on by Elvis, just like the rest of us. And Elvis was combining country and rhythm and blues anyway, long before any of us. But we’d done ‘Time Between’ and ‘Old John Robertson’ and lots of other songs in that style long before Sweetheart.”

Hillman picks up the story, and gives Gram a little more credit:

“I met Gram, standing in line at the bank. He came over to rehearsal, and he had two great songs — ‘Hickory Wind’ and ‘One Hundred Years From Now’ — and his youthful exuberance, I think, too, gave us a shot in the arm that we really needed. It was good timing. The Sweetheart sessions were fun, because we were down in Nashville and I had a comrade. I had Gram, who loved country music like I loved country music. He understood it, just as I did. So we hit it off immediately, and we had great times during the sessions down there.”

Recently I had an idea to create a tribute to the album by finding some covers and originals and putting them together in a playlist that I could listen to and share with friends. Never got around to that, but it stuck with me. So you might be wondering why only Side One? To be honest, as I started to work on this column I got hungry and went out for pizza. As I walked passed by a theater I impulsively stopped to see a film and then went to a bookstore. When I got home I fed the cat, watched the news, and forgot about my deadline. And going through YouTube looking for the right clips took longer than I anticipated, but abracadabra — a new concept has emerged. The one-sided tribute is now a thing, and trending.

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere – Counting Crows

I Am A Pilgrim – Merle Travis

https://youtu.be/fqVtQzRwYTw

The Christian Life – The Louvin Brothers

You Don’t Miss Your Water – William Bell

You’re Still On My Mind – Rodney Crowell

Pretty Boy Floyd – Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal

P.S. The show went on, I didn’t get malaria and was able to sneak up to a primo box seat overlooking the center stage. It was magic.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Jazz For People Who Hate Jazz

Louis Armstrong/Public Domain

Has anybody ever asked you “What kind of music do you like?” and you’ve replied, “I like all kinds”? I have. And that would not be truthful. I never liked jazz.

As a columnist who regularly writes and takes pleasure in sharing with you what music I’m enjoying and listening to in the moment or have discovered along the way that I find of interest, I’ve often rejected the notion of critical review. My mantra has been that all music is good to someone, somewhere, sometime. It compares with the position that places emphasis on perception over some hocus-pocus make-believe qualitative measurement. Or as David Hume wrote way back in 1742: ‘”Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”

With an affinity and preference for roots music, or perhaps that still hard-to-define genre we’ve classified as Americana, my own truth is that I do not love all music. I can differentiate between that music whose audio signals my brain can’t process with any sort of clarity — metal, punk, a lot of (but not all) hip-hop, experimental and free-form — and that which I simply can’t listen to because I have a negative emotional response. Like this song, which is closing in on 30,000,000 views on You Tube.

So … jazz. From my very first job in the mailroom of an indie music distributor in 1972 and throughout the next 35 years doing sales and marketing, I’ve represented some of the greatest labels and musicians, yet found most all of it barely listenable. I just couldn’t get my head or ears around it. The rare exceptions were an album on Riverside by Lil Hardin Armstrong, Ornette Coleman’s 1960 Change of The Century, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and anything by Django Reinhardt.

That changed in 2001 with the release of Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, which covered the history of the genre in America from the beginning of the 20th century to present day. As I watched and listened to those ten episodes, I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t relate to jazz, but rather that I hadn’t yet been exposed to what pleased my ears. My “sweet spot” ran from the early recordings of Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton, through the New Orleans and Harlem Renaissance period, the Chicago and Kansas City bands, and into the swing era and big bands of the late-’40s.

For a kid who only knew Louis Armstrong from his recording of “Hello, Dolly” and later “What a Wonderful World,” it was surprising for me to discover that he was as important to the history and development of jazz as the Carter Family or Jimmie Rodgers were to folk and country music. Armstrong moved in and out of bands for decades, playing with Kid Ory, King Oliver, and Fletcher Henderson, and accompanied vocalists Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith. He didn’t start singing himself until 1929, when he joined the pit orchestra for an all-black revue in New York called Hot Chocolates and performed “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

That clip speaks volumes to how closely jazz, blues, and the music from Appalachia were intertwined, and along with the Ken Burns film, it inspired me to go off and search for jazz recordings for people like myself, people who felt unable to connect with that genre. And the more I focused on studying the historical context and growth of all-American music instead of sticking to the school of strict genre-classification, the more my auditory palette grew.

If you’d like to take a trip down the jazz highway, here’s a few of the recordings and artists that I keep in rotation. They fit like fingers in a glove with all of my other roots music favorites.

Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers

Jay C. Higginbotham & His Six Hicks

King Oliver and Henry “Red” Allen

Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra

Bessie Smith

Fats Waller

Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Couch Potato’s Guide To AmericanaFest 2018

Photo by Engin Akyurt/Creative Commons 2.0

If you’re reading this you’re likely either on your way to Nashville for AmericanaFest or already there. Or, if you’re like me and a few hundred thousand other roots music fans, you’ll be staying right where you are and feeling awful because you’re missing all the action. I don’t normally get “festival envy,” but thinking about 500 performances at 60 venues over six nights and not having to sleep in a bag or get all wet or muddy to experience it sounds like fun. If I was going I’d top it off with a room on the concierge floor of the Vanderbilt Hotel, breakfast each morning at The Pancake Pantry, and hourly snacking on Goo Goo Clusters.

I’m sure this year’s events will be covered quite well here at No Depression and on their social media channels, and should you have masochistic tendencies and the need to boost your misery in not being there, here’s a few other websites that will also be covering the beat: Rolling Stone Country, The Boot, Wide Open Country, Billboard, and The Tennessean. NPR Music and World Cafe will also webcast the Americana Music Honors & Awards ceremony live from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. For all the kudos that SXSW and Folk Alliance get for showcasing roots music, from afar it looks like the Americana Music Association has now taken the lead.

It’ll be interesting to hear back from artists and attendees on whether last year’s complaints about a lack of diversity — less than 10 percent of the 300 performers were acts that weren’t made up of exclusively white members — have been addressed. And as Billboard reported after last year’s festivities, “not only has Album of the Year never gone to a person of color during the 18 years that the award has been given out, but only twice in the history of the Awards & Honors event has an act led by an artist of color won a voter-decided awards: Alabama Shakes in 2012 for Emerging Artist of the Year and The Mavericks in 2015 for Best Duo/Group of the Year.”

Don’t expect much change, as diversity and inclusion move at glacial speed. If you’d like to see this year’s list of nominees for awards and honors, here’s the link. I love the idea of a big concert and showcase night to celebrate Americana music, but also wish that they’d toss the whole award process out the window. There’s so much great music that gets released each year that it seems self-defeating for the promotion and growth of the genre to limit exposure to basically a handful of artists. The “big tent” concept of Americana music seems more like a six-person lean-to for the mostly Nashville-based voting members.

I’ve taken a look at the list of performers this year who haven’t been nominated for awards, and expect that they will offer up some sizzling sets; the talent pool is Olympic-sized. Here’s a few clips for y’all. Maybe I’ll start saving my money to travel down to Nashville for next year’s 20th anniversary.

Dom Flemons

The Milk Carton Kids

Birds of Chicago

The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band

Sunny War

The Earls of Leicester

Rev. Sekou

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Rose Connolly and The Southern Gothic

Everly Brothers/The Guardian

The history of Rose Connally, also known as Down in The Willow Garden, a song first documented in 1915 by song-catcher Cecil Sharp during his travels throughout Virginia and North Carolina.

The award winning HBO’s miniseries Sharp Objects, was adapted from a book of the same name written by Gillian Flynn. I won’t spoil it for those who have yet to see it, but it takes place in the fictional town of Wind Gap, Missouri, and is primarily about the investigation into the murder and mutilation of teenage girls. More than that, though, it runs the psychological gamut of dysfunctional families with secrets and small town dynamics, self-harm and childhood trauma, sexual assault and violence towards women. The eight episodes are indeed not for the faint of heart, but the use of music throughout the show is central to its Southern Gothic genre.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée teamed up with music supervisor Susan Jacobs, who he also worked with him on 2014’s Wild. In a recent article from Billboard magazine, Jacobs described the director’s use of music as a “painting” and said “It’s much more of a basket weave with Jean-Marc, as he’s cutting pictures right with the music that is all planned out in advance before we shoot.” Vallée also does not use scores, only licensed tracks. On this project he created a “sonic palette” for each of his characters, using Led Zeppelin for the protagonist and including music spanning multiple generations from Patsy Cline to Chris Stapleton. Almost all of the music throughout the show comes from one of two places: an old broken iPod or an expensive audiophile’s dream system, and it creates an interesting juxtaposition.

It was the final song of episode seven that played through the rolling credits on the screen that caught my attention. I immediately recognized the Everly Brothers, and knew they recorded “Down in the Willow Garden” (also known as “Rose Connolly”) for their 1958 Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. For the BBC documentary Bringing It All Back Home, which traces the history of Irish folk music, they discussed and performed the song, a traditional murder ballad that — like many other songs — traveled to the Appalachian Mountains with the families who came looking for work in America.

Despite the many different spellings of Rose’s surname — Connoley, Conley, Connally, Condolee, Connilley, Condelee, Congalee, Cumberly, or Caudeley – the song’s lyrics haven’t altered all that much over time. It was likely written back in the 19th century, possibly as early as 1811. Documented in 1915 by songcatcher Cecil Sharp during his travels throughout Virginia and North Carolina, it was first recorded for the Victor Talking Machine Company sometime in either 1927 or 1928 by G.B. Grayson and Henry Whittier.

Wade Mainer and Zeke Morris recorded their version for Bluebird Records in 1937, but it was Charlie McCoy and His Kentucky Pardners who popularized the song in 1947 for RCA. As is the case with many traditional songs, McCoy took the composer’s credit along with Roy Acuff.

If it wasn’t for all the violence in the lyrics, it’d be a lovely song. The melody itself is quite pleasing, the Everlys version in particular, with their familial close harmony adding a particularly haunting and lonesome quality to it. But at the heart it’s simply just another murder ballad where a man kills a woman; though in this case not just once but three times. Poor Rose is poisoned, stabbed, and finally thrown into the river. It’s the murderer’s father who is portrayed as the victim, wiping away his tears while having to watch his son get hung from the gallows.

In the ’50s, in addition to the Everly Brothers’ interpretation, there were versions recorded by both the Stanley and Osbourne Brothers, as well as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the ’60s Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it as “Rose Connelly” and Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys added it to their repertoire, as heard in this 1966 live performance captured in Madison, New Jersey.

In 1973, Art Garfunkel, with all due respect, recorded an absolutely dreadful pop-like version for his album Angel Claire. In the film Raising Arizona, Holly Hunter sings it as an unlikely lullaby. Since then it’s been covered by a multitude of folks, including Nick Cave, Bon Iver with The Chieftains, Honus Honus, The Chapin Sisters, Norah Jones and Billy Joe Armstrong, Shakey Graves and Mark Kozelek. Judging by all the activity on YouTube, it also has become a staple for a younger generation of old-time musicians.

After listening to an endless number of recorded versions, for me it comes back to the Everly Brothers. They are the linchpin of it all, adapting an old-world song learned and passed down by their daddy and releasing it on a traditional country-ballad album just as they were about to go out on tour with Buddy Holly to support their five successive rock-and-roll hit singles on Cadence Records. Two years away from signing with Warner Bros. and continuing their string of rock classics, Cadence chose to not promote Songs Our Daddy Taught Us nor release any singles from it.

I’ll close it out with their original studio version, and one might say it’s harmonically one beautiful sharp object.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

No Depression Magazine: 1995-2008

The cover of #75, the final issue/Photo by Easy Ed

It’s an unusual and sad anniversary of sorts, and one I’ve either missed reading about or perhaps it simply slipped by unnoticed. On a spring day in 2008 I picked up the most recent issue of No Depression, a magazine that I had been reading for much of the decade, though they had been on the racks for 13 years. They were the last in a long line of music publications that I would read from cover to cover, starting back in my early teens with 16, Teen Life, and Hit Parader and moving on throughout my adult years to Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Zoo World, Sing Out!, Broadside, Down Beat, Goldmine, Relix, BAM, Pulse, Billboard, Cashbox, Record World, Music Connection, Trouser Press, Dirty Linen, and Harp. But for reasons I still have not yet reconciled nor understood, No Depression was the only one I had a strong and emotional attachment to. And so when I picked up issue #74 and turned to page 2, the following words from Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock, and Kyla Fairchild hit me in the gut.

“Dear Friends, Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish. It is difficult even to type those words, so please know that we have not come lightly to this decision.”

The three owners continued to tick off the circumstances that brought an end to a magazine where “readership has not significantly declined, our newsstand sell-through remains among the best in our portion of the industry and our passion for and pleasure in the music has in no way diminished.” So what killed it off? A decline in advertising revenue from struggling record labels, a music industry in transition from brick and mortar to digital, increased internet traffic, and the cost of paper and production. And of course the overall economy was in free fall. People were losing their jobs, homes, and savings, and so taking that into consideration, the loss of a niche publication that supported the three owners, two additional full-time employees, and several dozen editors, writers, and artists was simply a reflection of the times.

“I have deeply enjoyed your magazine and have kept them all. Will give them to my children and grandchildren when I’m gone. Thank you for all the articles on my family members – A.P., Sara, Maybelle, Helen, June, Anita, Johnny Cash & etc. I am A.P. and Sara’s oldest grandchild; will be 70 years old in August.” — Flo Wolfe

With a cover price of $5.95 and a tagline beneath the magazine’s logo that read “The Final Issue Of … Well, Whatever That Is,” No Depression ceased publication with issue #75. It was 144 pages of doing what they’ve always done best: long-form stories, reviews of concerts, albums, books, and films, ads that heralded new music and reissues, and the “Box Full of Letters” from their readers. But this final issue couldn’t help being a little different than all others, because it was the end of something important to many people.

“Since the notice of foreclosure on hope arrived, I’ve been sitting here in melancholy marinade … without an issue or subscription of No Depression magazine, I feel like Charlie Brown waiting at his mailbox on Valentine’s Day, wondering why, at this point, I even need a mailbox.” — Scott Michael Anderson

As I leaf through the final issue, I’m surprised of the large number of musicians who were written about in 2008 and are still performing and recording today, somehow managing to navigate the shark-filled waters of an abysmal music industry that has chomped on and spit out so many others. What we generally call roots music was first recorded and popularized back in 1927, and its resilience and relatively small but vibrant popularity as a non-mainstream genre is just as surprising as it is comforting.

“I will reluctantly face detox after I have read the last issue. Over the past 10 years my cravings for the next ND would build until I had the new issue in hand. Then, like no other magazine before … I would feast from kiver to kiver … savoring the morsels of information and insights. What kept me captivated was that you always stayed contrary to ordinary.” — Tim Willis

The last cover had a black-and-white photograph of Buddy Miller that was slightly off-center. And these were the words written to the left of him: “Guitarist, songwriter, producer, singer, and a man who loves music: Buddy Miller is our artist of the decade.”

With accompanying photographs by Thomas Petillo, it was Grant Alden who wrote the article on Buddy. His writing style has always been unique and in stark contrast to anything one might consider music journalism. He reads like a beat poet with his own distinct rhythm, in which a single sentence can carry an idea or thought that other writers take paragraphs to convey. Just the title alone is worth every ounce of ink: “A disquisition on the centrality of love and faith in the music of Buddy Miller and the several other reasons he is the artist of the decade. And stuff.”

“What will we do without you? I even read all the damn advertisements, for God’s sake.” — Peter Kraemer

Buddy turns 66 this year, and during the time period since Grant’s article was published, he traveled extensively on the Alison Krauss-Robert Plant Raising Sand tour, followed by his concerts billed as Three Girls and Their Buddy with Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, and Shawn Colvin. Early in 2009 he suffered a heart attack and had triple bypass surgery. At that year’s Americana Music Association Honors and Awards, he and his wife Julie were the winners for album, song, and duo/group. Buddy also won Artist of the Year. He’s released three albums, including one with his partner and sidekick Jim Lauderdale, has been either a guest artist, producer, or engineer on way more than a dozen others, and is active with the annual AmericanaFest and the Cayamo cruises.

“Your magazine has been an oasis for me. Other mags have covered some of the same artists, but opening No Depression was like going in to a special old room and closing the door and seeing all your friends there.” — Pat Fitzgerald

Peter and Kyla had plans to transition No Depression into a website (Grant chose to sell his share back, not seeing a way to continue successfully online) that not only featured paid writers, but also created space for music bloggers such as myself. The concept was to create a global ND community allowing readers to comment and interact with the writers and remain a trusted music source fostering two-way dialogue. There was also a “bookazine” that published long-form stories, edited by Grant and Peter. Three editions were done before they moved on to other projects and like Grant, Peter also sold his share of ND to Kyla. She poured her heart, soul, and money into building and running the site until she decided to make a change, and sold it in 2014 to the current owners, the FreshGrass Foundation. As you probably are well aware, with the guiding hands of former editor Kim Ruehl and help from a Kickstarter campaign, No Depression began publishing a quarterly journal the following year. And here we are today … 23 years as an entity, 10 years as a website, and forever in my musical DNA.

“Well, shit. Thanks for what you were able to do.” — Quinn Martin

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.