Tag Archives: Joan Shelley

Still Listening To Music On Your Radio?

Photo by Alex Loban/Pixabay

Is there anybody else out there that recalls listening to music on your radio? I’m talkin’ late-night listening, twirling the dial and discovering stuff you’ve never heard before? Well, you can’t much variety anymore, especially when it comes to Americana or roots music. I’ve become a sophisticated streamer who zigs and zags through curated playlists, still reads the last of the music blogs, and tries to find good music to share. Hopefully, some of these clips I’ve posted below will turn you on to something new.

The summer music festival season has now come and gone, many of us have watched and discussed ad nauseam Ken Burns’ 16-hour Country Music series, and the annual awards for both Americana and bluegrass music have been handed out. But before you curl up and pretend you’re a hibernating bear, I thought I’d bring your attention to some recent releases that may have slipped past you in the sweltering heat of the summer.

And by the way, I’d like to mention that I think Greta Thunberg is one awesome young woman, and we’re damn lucky to have her and a new generation rising up and challenging the old men with their power grips on our planet. Global warming ain’t a hoax.

Let’s get to the music.

Luther Dickinson and Sisters of the Strawberry Moon – Solstice

The North Mississippi Allstar just wanted a producer credit but the label chose to slap his name on it for whatever reasons labels choose to do such things. The collective of musicians and singers includes Amy Helm, Amy LaVere, Sharde Thomas, Birds of Chicago, and the Como Mamas. Recorded over four days at the Dickinson family’s Zebra Ranch Studio down in Independence, there was no ability to take this project out on the road given everyone’s various commitments. But it’s a helluva record that you might want to check out.

Joan Shelley – Like the River Loves the Sea

I have a particular fondness for the musical genre of “soft-spoken women playing acoustic guitar,” and my favorite Port Royal, Kentucky export has released her latest solo album, traveling to Iceland in order to lay down the tracks. I’ve lost count of how many albums she has out now, but it’s close to a half dozen and if you look hard enough you’ll also find her on several other projects.

Audie Blaylock and Redline – Originalist

As a teenager in the early ’80s, Audie Blaylock played mandolin with Jimmy Martin & The Sunny Mountain Boys and stayed with them for over a decade. After playing in Rhonda Vincent’s band, he formed Redline about 15 years ago. While they play in the traditional bluegrass style, they also add new tunes to keep the music relevant.

Dori Freeman – Every Single Star

Recorded last winter in Brooklyn with Teddy Thompson producing, as he did for her last two albums, this one features 10 new original songs from the pride of Galax, Virginia. As Appalachian music is generally considered a family tradition, Freeman also plays with the Willard Gayheart Family Band, featuring her grandfather, her own father Scott Freeman, and husband Nick Falk.

Ana Egge – Is It the Kiss

I believe this marks Egge’s 12th album in 22 years, and it’s another Brooklyn-recorded project. She is a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist who defies being pigeonholed into one genre or another, but every project she’s done is its own unique gift for the listener. This one swings into both country and soul territory, and Alec Spiegelman gets kudos for his production and arrangements. Love that Iris DeMent is a guest as well.

The Small Glories – Assinboine & The Red

Based in Winnipeg, this duo features Cara Luft, an original member of the Wailin’ Jennys, on clawhammer banjo and guitarist/singer JD Edwards. Known for their unique stage banter as well as their music, this is their second full album and they have also put out two EPs.

Emily Scott Robinson – Traveling Mercies

If you’re a regular reader of my column you already know about Emily Scott Robinson, as I can’t stop writing about her. Traveling Mercies is my favorite album of the year, and this storyteller and vocalist touches me deeply with her lyrics. This first song is the one that has given her much press, as it speaks in very personal terms of her own sexual assault.

I’ll leave you with one more from Robinson, because I’m in a very sharing mood. And that’s the way it is on a hot day in autumn.

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

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.

The One About Doug Sahm and the Jukebox

That photo is a beauty, isn’t it? Wish that old jukebox was mine, but it’s just a stock photo I found somewhere in space and snatched for this week’s column. The plan was to write an update on the Doug Sahm documentary that debuted in 2015 at SXSW, but I got sidetracked when I found this 1959 single he recorded of “Why, Why, Why” and it reminded me of Gilbert’s El Indio on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica.

It’s been over 25 years since I’ve been there, and it was a Friday night destination for years. In addition to serving up the finest margaritas and Mexican food west of Boyle Heights, they had an old school “three for a quarter” jukebox, loaded with mostly 45s from the ’50s and ’60s. My go-to song back in the day was Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and usually by the time we were on our second pitcher of adult beverage I’d stack it up to play a dozen times in a row. But had this one been on there, it might have been a contender.

That’s not Doug’s first record, and I don’t really have too much to tell you about the film other than the title: Sir Doug and The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove. I did find a pretty good article about it published at Texas Monthly and a review here on No Depression, which has several video clips including the trailer. It’s been showing at film festivals for the past year or so, and despite exceeding a Kickstarter campaign goal to get it into distribution, seems like it’s not quite a done deal yet. I can’t wait to see it because I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, and his story spans several decades, genres, and memories.

Back to the jukebox … I miss it. When I was a kid my family would often have Sunday night dinners at a place in Philly called the Italian Riviera, and their box was filled with songs from Mario Lanza, Rocco Granata, Caterina Valente, Dean Martin, and Connie Francis – our favorite because cousin Arnold was her producer. But this was probably the most played song of that era: Domenico Modungo’s version of “Volare.”

While you can still find them at some bars, there are only two companies left that currently manufacture the coin-operated devices. There’s a bunch of touch screen, digital models being sold, but they just don’t connect with my teenage memories of sitting in a diner and dropping quarters into the slot.

These days I prefer the one that fits in my pocket, can hold 20,000 songs, lets me pay the bills, read the news, get a car, play games, rant on social media, take pictures, and occasionally make a call. I’ll close it out with sharing five songs currently on my “new music” playlist. Three are new or recently found versions of old songs, and two are new songs that just sound old, which sums up how I’m feeling right now.

Chris Hillman
The album Bidin’ My Time was produced by Tom Petty and executive produced by Herb Pedersen and features David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Mike Campbell, Mark Fain, Steve Ferrone, John Jorgenson, Josh Jové, Jay Dee Maness, Benmont Tench, and Gabe Witcher. The album kicks off with a new recording of Pete Seeger’s and Welsh poet Idris Davies’ “The Bells of Rhymney,” which the Byrds recorded for their debut. I believe that’s Crosby and Pedersen doing harmony with Hillman.

Joan Shelley
In December 2016, she and guitarist Nathan Salsburg joined Jeff Tweedy in Wilco’s Loft studio for five days. Spencer Tweedy joined on drums, while James Elkington shifted between piano and resonator guitar. Jeff added electric accents and some bass, but mostly he helped the band stay out of its own way.

Tom Brosseau
“Treasures Untold is a 10-song collection recorded live at an intimate event in Cologne, Germany. Across six adaptations from the Great American Folksong Book, and four of Brosseau’s own original tunes, he manages to build a dreamy, atmospheric mood with just his voice and an acoustic guitar” – Maeri Ferguson, Glide Magazine

Neil Young
A 41-year-old “lost and found” album sounds like it was recorded last week. He says he did it one night strung out on weed, cocaine, and booze, but on most tracks you can hardly tell. Love the animation on this video, which was created by Black Balloon.

Richard Thompson
Acoustic Rarities is the third album in a series that began in 2014. These tracks are some of his more obscure material along with some never before released and cover versions. “Sloth” first appeared on Fairport Convention’s 1970 Full House album, and Thompson left the band the following year.

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

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #2

Photo by Sandy Dyas

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column has been a fixture at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music for over ten years. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising

It doesn’t seem all that long ago when hardy music buyers and fans would get in line late on a Monday night outside their local record store. At midnight the doors would be unlocked and the Tuesday new releases were put out for sale. The bigger titles would have been advertised in the Sunday papers, there would likely have already been reviews printed in magazines or other print media, you may have heard a tune or two on the radio and for at least that week you’d get a reduction off the regular price.

These days, the ‘official release date’ that the music industry uses is Friday, but that has little meaning anymore to most consumers who hear about new music online at infinite points of origin. A click here, a click there…and you can pretty much learn about new stuff and hear anything at anytime. There are exceptions, but not often.

So with that, there seems to be a revised definition to this term ‘new release’. With an annual pipeline of almost a couple hundred thousand albums released, something is new when you first hear about it. Yeah…there is still this mini-factory assembly line that a lot of musicians follow trying to get the word out in a short burst for maximum impact…but that makes sense for the one percenters, not necessarily every single title.

With that in mind, here’s something new to me that was released back in February from Alligator Records. I love me a good tribute and anthology, and God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson fills the bill.

blindwillie-compressed

The project originally began as a Kickstarter campaign, and features crazy-great performances from Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Sinéad O’Connor, the Blind Boys Of Alabama, Cowboy Junkies, and more. Listen to the full stream via Pitchfork and here’s the man himself, filmed in 1927.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Sandy The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….including this one I originally published back in January 2014 at No Depression dot com.

Long Before N.W.A. There Was Country Music Straight Outta Compton

Back in 1951 a weekly country radio show was broadcasted live from Town Hall in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton. Within two years it had been picked up as a TV program by NBC and local station KTTV, there were 39 syndicated shows taped for Screen Gems and it had a damngood run, with it’s final show in January 1961. Had a few different names, but mostly it was either the Town Hall Party or The Ranch Party. There’s a good wiki page here on details.

Hosted by Tex Ritter, the list of weekly guest stars included pretty much anybody you might think of back in those times…Lefty Frizzell Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Patsy Cline, Merle Travis, Gene Autry, Sons of The Pioneers, The Collins Kids, Johnny Bond, Smiley Burnette. To our good fortune, many of the shows and individual performances are available on You Tube. Try this search link if you want a shortcut.

The 10-piece Town Hall Party band featured Joe Maphis, Merle Travis, the superb female steel guitarist Marian Hall, Billy Hill and Fiddlin’ Kate on violins, PeeWee Adams on drums, Jimmy Pruitt on piano, and other excellent musicians who created a Town Hall Party sound also heard on many country sessions produced by Columbia Records in Hollywood in the 1950s. Thought I’d share this one with you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXmNdRJ1E_Q

What Exactly Did Tony Visconti Say at SXSW Music 2016?

Acclaimed American record producer Tony Visconti, famous for his many records with David Bowie (including his final album, “Darkstar”), Marc Bolan, Paul McCartney, Badfinger, Iggy Pop, Morrissey and others, briefly choked up onstage last week during his South by Southwest keynote talk at the Austin Convention Center as he finished reading a fictionalized account of the grim future of the record industry. (Story here.)

The story ended with a jaded record executive jumping from the balcony of his skyscraper residence to his death. The dapper 71-year-old producer threw down his prepared notes and had to compose himself afterward.

Couple of thoughts from Tony:

-The vast amount of music being uploaded on to YouTube is “clogging the arteries” of the music business; unmediated and unfocused.

-“With the population doubling how come we can’t sell records? The record labels now are not giving you quality, that’s why you’re disenchanted, that’s why you don’t buy records.”

-Fans “used to put a vinyl record on a turntable” and play it hundreds of times. “None of that goes on today. There are great people all around us – the next David Bowie lives somewhere in the world, the next Beatles, the next Springsteen but they’re not getting a shot, they’re not being financed.”

-Our music industry is one “where singles all sound the same, where sales aren’t that great, where people are streaming and if you get 20 million [plays], you get enough for a nice steak dinner”.

-“I’ve always had black kimonos. I’ve always loved black kimonos. I know I’m rambling on. I’ll get to the point where I met David Bowie.”

Mixed reviews, but Vulture wrote: “By catering to cultural curiosity, excavating his early career, and using both his platform and the room’s rapt attention to strike while the iron was hot with a cautionary tale, Visconti did better than a sentimental speech. He casually played with prophecy, a move his much-missed friend would certainly appreciate.”

Bob Dylan’s 25 Musical Heroes

This list was assembled and published a few weeks ago over at The Telegraph and I found it a quick interesting read. Here’s just a couple of my fave quotes, but do go take a look for yourself at the whole enchilada.

Boy, I love them . . . the Flying Burrito Brothers, unh-huh. I’ve always known Chris Hillman, you know, from when he was in the Byrds, who had a distinctive sound. And he’s always been a fine musician. The Brothers’ records knocked me out.

John Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about Sam Stone the soldier junky daddy and Donald and Lydia, where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be Lake Marie. I don’t remember what album that’s on.

Karen Dalton is my favourite singer. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.

I Just Sold My Newport Folk Festival Ticket and Won’t See Joan Shelley.

It ain’t easy to get a 3-day pass to Newport because they do this email notification thing through Ticketmaster, and you gotta act fast. I did, and bought mine a couple months ago. It was just around $200, which I think is a bargain for what you know will be an amazing musical weekend of exploration and discovery. You don’t even know yet who’ll be on the program, as only about a dozen folks have been announced, but its hardly a leap of faith to know it’ll be great. Joan Shelley will be there…knowing I’ll miss her is a disappointment. Her music speaks to me.

My one and only time at Newport was in 2014, and although I held tickets for last summer a ‘life happens’ moment forced a pullout. I was pretty sure I would be good-to-go this year until I sat down and worked on the details. A sad-assed vertigo sufferer, the train seemed like a better mode of transport than my Civic, and there would be some ground transportation needed to get to town from the station. Once there, moving around is pretty easy. Walking, boat shuttle, taxis. But where to stay…oh my. With an average lodging cost of about $300 per day…camping not an option…that’s what did me in. I couldn’t find a way to make the whole thing come in at much less than a thousand bucks, and although I love music, I’m a man with a budgetary restriction. So not this year…sorry.

By the way, Ticketmaster has a pretty neat way for you to take a ticket, put it up for sale through them, and in less than a week it was sold to someone else and my dough was re-deposited into my account. I think I lost twenty bucks or so in fees, but its an easy way out.

On Sharon Jones: A Favorite Story from Oxford American

Homecoming Queen by Maxwell George was published on January 19, 2015.

North Augusta Baptist Church is a humble house of God, steepleless and cast in brick, with a pair of squat towers flanking the stained-glass black Messiah on its façade. Last summer, I got my picture taken next to the marquee out front, which advertised an upcoming Youth Revival weekend—fitting enough, since my being there related to a former young congregant. In the mid-1960s, soul singer Sharon Jones gave her first public performance here, as a singing angel in the Christmas pageant when she was in the third grade. (Click here to continue.)

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

I aggregate and post daily on my Twitter feed:@therealeasyed and Facebook page:The Real Easy Ed: Roots Music and Random Thoughts. My every other week Broadside column is published at No Depression.

Make Americana Great Again: Why We Cherish Those Amazing Polls

That is one helluva picture. You might recall that it surfaced this past June after Neil Young demanded that Donald Trump stop using “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his campaign events. Utilizing his standard and preferred method of statesmanship, Trump went on the morning news shows, called Young a bad name, and then tweeted this: “A few months ago Neil Young came to my office looking for $$$ on an audio deal and called me last week to go to his concert. Wow!”

Young, no slouch himself when it comes to using social media, seemed to confirm Trump’s assertion of capitalistic hypocrisy when he wrote on Facebook: “It was a photograph taken during a meeting when I was trying to raise funds for Pono, my online high resolution music service.”

That Neil Young would choose Trump to get cozy with as a potential partner is enough to cause the price of flannel futures to tumble. Besides, in the past several months, Young’s digital entree has entered and floundered into the ether of a disinterested marketplace.

Pushing that particular random thought-bubble aside, it’s time to talk about the annual readers and critics polls that focus on one type of music or another. These are soon to occupy much of our collective time and space via traditional and social media, using the skill sets and wisdom of random cubes tossed together in a Yahtzee cup and spilt onto the countertop. Can we all agree that this excercise produces an inaccurate and imperfect list of superlatives? At the very least, I hope it will open up new avenues of exploration for some folks, as well as simply serving to bolster our own opinions based on an album’s popularity.

It is the former that most excites me because, with well over 120,000 new albums being released each year, there is no possible way to see all, know all, or hear all. It’s the depth and diversity of new music that makes scanning these polls so much fun. Nothing beats discovering something that slipped through the cracks.

In late October, the editor of No Depression:The Roots Music Authority requested a list of my favorite titles (I think she used the word “best”), and this is the list I sent her:

Jason Isbell, Daniel Romano, John Moreland, Pharis and Jason Romero, Tom Brosseau, Noah Gundersen, Watkins Family Hour, Joan Shelley, Milk Carton Kids, and an exceptional concert compilation called Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of a Dreadful Film. (Note to self: Going forward, try to be nicer.)

I’m sure y’all can spot the problem. It was way too exclusive. Narrowing my favorite albums of the year down to ten is just plain silly.

I also would have loved to include releases from Calexico, Jessica Pratt, the Westies, Kristin Andreassen, Joe Pug, Shakey Graves, Sufjan Stevens, The Kennedys, Kepi Ghoulie, Leon Bridges, Meg Baird, the Lonesome Trio, the Deslondes, Frazey Ford, the Skylarks, Kacey Musgraves, Ana Egge, Darrell Scott, Nikki Talley, Lindi Ortega, Dave Rawlings Machine, Jill Andrews, Darlingside, Decemberists, Daniel Martin Moore, Susie Glaze and the Hilonesome Band, and my friends Spuyten Duyvil.

I really like the duos and duets too. Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield, Anna and Elizabeth, the Lowest Pair, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. Not to mention the Honey Dewdrops, Iron and Wine and Ben Bridwell, Dave and Phil Alvin, and both the Wainwright and Chapin Sisters.

Don’t forget compilations with really long names that may or may not have been released this year, that I’ve been enjoying regardless: Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers, The Brighter Side: A 25th Anniversary Tribute to Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton, and Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music On the Mason-Dixon Line.

And then there are the names you already know: Iris Dement, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Leonard Cohen, Jesse Winchester, Dwight Yoakam, Mark Knopfler, Fairport Convention, and Bob Dylan (the old new stuff, not the new old stuff).

I haven’t counted them up, but this longer list of mine can’t be more than 50 or 60 albums — a pitiful, sickly and puny little list. Seriously, I’m ashamed. There are at least 119,940 or more to choose from and I know that you can do better than me. Whether you participate in the No Depression poll or any of the thousands of others that lurk out there, relax and enjoy. Have fun, don’t stress, don’t argue. It’s all about exploration.

Postscript: For the record, Americana is a radio format and an association, not a genre.

Have You Heard Any Good Music Lately?

A few decades ago, when I ran a record store in California, I must have been asked that question a few hundred times a day. They weren’t usually the first words spoken by a new customer, since ascertaining the whereabouts and accessibility of our bathroom and confirming if we would accept personal checks were the top two. But after a cursory look at the waterfalls and end caps with the signage advertising sales and new releases, and a flip or two through the bins, most people would work up the courage to come to the counter, or engage some employee who was restocking the shelves out on the floor, and pop the question.

Anybody who has ever worked in a record store will tell you it was the best moment of the day. That question meant we got to do what we loved to do best: talk about music we knew about, that you’d never heard of. Of course there was a trick to getting it right. You didn’t want to pitch Ralph Stanley to the guy who was holding a dozen used classical albums by a specific Hungarian composer, nor make a rookie mistake like I once did when I handed Mike Love’s solo album of cover songs to Brian Wilson, who smacked it hard, grumbled, and stormed out. If you were going to discuss or suggest something, you needed to know your audience, have some idea of what you were talking about, and be able to stand your ground two days later when they brought it back and you had to lay the “no refund/no exchange” policy on them. A thankless job it was, indeed.

These days, when I want to find out about new music or even older titles that I’ve skipped over, there aren’t many places left to go nor many people to talk to. There are about a half-dozen websites in addition to this one that I visit regularly, to pick up threads of news about new artists and releases. I use You Tube and Spotify more than any other streaming services, wandering about usually late at night, like a prospector panning for gold. Living in a big city allows me access to a number of college and public radio stations, where left-of-center music is served up. And hitting just three festivals per summer exposes me to about a hundred acts over the course of a couple of weekends.

But there is something quite sad to this mission of a mostly singular search and discovery, and it makes me recall that there was once a forum over at No Depression dot com that endured for years. It was probably the most popular community forum topic and it asked the simple question about what you were listening to. People responded and shared almost daily. I thought it was a great service to the roots music community, but things change and it’s now hard to find. It was just sort of an old fashioned notion — an online bulletin board that went the way of AOL dial-up. Still, I sort of miss it.

So in the spirit and memory of that old fashioned community forum, where I met many good people, learned an awful lot, and expanded my musical horizons, here’s a brief list of what I’ve been listening to in the past couple of weeks. There’s some old, some new. Some borrowed, some blues. Should the spirit move you, head over to No Depression where this is posted, share your own list in the comments box, and you’ll get notified when others do the same. Then you too can answer the question: Have you heard any good music lately?

Joan Shelley – Over and Even: I loved her earlier collaboration with Daniel Martin Moore, and he engineered this one. Nathan Salsburg plays guitar. Will Oldham and Glen Detinger provide harmonies. It’s a Louisville thing.

Ola Belle Reed: Dust-To-Digital’s August-released book about her life comes with a two-disc sampler. Unbelievable.

Daniel Romano – If I’ve Only One Time Askin’: If you love your late-1950s, early-’60s classic country shaken and stirred with a touch of Gram Parsons, this is for you.

Nikki Talley – Out from the Harbor: I know, there are seven million singer-songwriters out on the road these days, but this woman delivers the type of North Carolina country you wished your local radio station played.

Meg Baird – Don’t Weigh Down the Light: A Philadelphian moves to San Francisco and mixes her Appalachian-style roots guitar work with ethereal vocals and an electric collaborator to create a post-Espers flashback.

The Kennedys – West: Pete and Maura bring out this duo album as well as two solo efforts. Expect more Byrds-like jingle-jangle guitar and their great, close harmonies. Catch them live if you can.

Los Lobos: I’m immersed in their entire catalog, which could take several years to get through. I’ve got acoustic En Vivo, Kiko, and the new Gates of Gold in heavy rotation now. And a tip of the sombrero to Los Super Seven — a great side project.

Oxford American Southern Music Samplers: Blessings to my friend in England who sent me his complete collection, going back to 1999. Most are sold out, but head over to the OA website and sign up to reserve this year’s sampler, which focuses on the music of Georgia. While you’re there, you can grab the few others still in print.

Okay, you’re it.

This was originally published at No Depression dot com, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Image by Joe Haupt/Creative Commons License