Arts and Entertainment

Not every hobby gets its own national holiday, especially one in the seductive days of Spring. If there’s a “Souvenir Spoon Collectors Day” sweeping the nation each year, we haven’t heard of it. But vinyl junkies and music lovers have grown accustomed, in the manner of youngsters and Christmas, to the arrival of Record Store Day every April. For a dozen years now, fans have lined up before the sun rises to invest (yes, that’s the word) in their passion.

Spring brings with it a rush of music-themed events, and these jumped out at us as not-to-be missed shots of creativity, philanthropy and history.

On Thursday, April 11, Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre will host “An Evening of Stories and Songs” with southern novelists Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle holding down the literary side and songwriters Marshall Chapman and Matraca Berg anchoring the evening’s songwriting. Ticket proceeds benefit the Friends of Vanderbilt’s Libraries.

On a sunny late afternoon last September, the band Nefesh Mountain prepared to take a stage in front of the North Carolina state capitol. They could see a half mile down Fayetteville Street, where tens of thousands of people mingled and moved among eight different stages at Raleigh’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival. A good crowd was left over from the prior act. It seemed like an ideal setting, but singer Doni Zasloff suddenly got uncharacteristically anxious.

Lucinda Williams recently sat down with WMOT host and program director, Jessie Scott to talk about the 20th anniversary of her groundbreaking album 'Car Wheels On A Gravel Road'. Williams is touring with her band in celebration of the 20 years of songs like "Jackson" and "Drunken Angel" which she played and recorded for WMOT at Colin Linden's Nashville studio. 

Williams will bring the Car Wheels tour to the Ryman Auditorium April 2, 2019.

Getting an early jump on pursuing your dreams is important, and it would be hard to jump earlier than did Colin Linden at his destiny in blues and roots music.

On June 25, 2011 more than a dozen fire trucks sirened their way to a handsome brick and timber house on Nashville’s Belmont Boulevard, where a blaze was engulfing the second floor. It was a historic loss - The Cowboy Arms Hotel And Recording Spa, the fancifully named, fully-functioning studio (and home) of Cowboy Jack Clement, one of the few songwriters and record producers who could legitimately be called legendary.

Songwriter Mindy Smith has announced her first tour dates in several years - a run of shows in May and June that will celebrate the release of her debut album on vinyl and ease her back into a relationship with her adoring, and patient, fans. An announcement says the tour will visit acoustic listening rooms such as Atlanta’s Eddie’s Attic and The Open Chord in Knoxville “so I could be as up close and personal as possible,” according to the artist.

Mac Wiseman came to a fork in the road of history where country music and bluegrass parted ways, and he took both. The singer known as “The Voice With A Heart” died Sunday at age 93, leaving a wide-ranging body of acclaimed recorded work and a legacy in the business as well, having been a co-founder of both the Country Music Association and the International Bluegrass Music Association. He sang with Bill Monroe, but he also landed on the country charts between 1959 and 1979. He joined the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014.

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry is a convivial commotion of rehearsing and visiting, a friends-and-family ethos that infuses the show on stage with heart, even if the audience can’t see it directly. On February 13, that energy and affection was focused on a single performer, a gentleman with a beatific smile and a signature silver pompadour who slipped easily from conversation to the stage for multiple collaborations. A double-take birthday cake in the coffee lounge told the story.

On a January evening at Analog, the high tech venue in the Hutton Hotel on West End, Jed Hilly, executive director of the Americana Music Association, welcomed a full house. He talked about booking shows, routing tours, getting advance press and radio promotion.

“Those four components of the music business are critical when you’re out there on a tour,” he said. “It’s one thing to get a gig, but how are you going to get (people) to come to the gig? So we created this initiative.”

We’ve now been to the movie and we know how it ends. Two powerful women of country music, snubbed in recent years by the radio format their heroines helped build into America’s largest, showed the music industry – on that imperfect but necessary stage that is the Grammy Awards - that they are the voices and songwriters of now.  

If Americana values all American roots forms and the fusion thereof, then nobody's more Americana than Austin singer/songwriter Ruthie Foster. She grew up singing in church in rural Texas, developed a variety of skills in bands while serving in the US Navy, then became a folk troubadour who slips from country to soul to blues to gospel with ease.

To kick off 2019 in its ongoing coverage of American music and its culture, The String features a true icon of authentic country/roots music, indeed one of the artists around whom the Americana format was conceived in the 1990s. Rodney Crowell is both a songwriter’s songwriter and an artist who’s reached and moved mainstream music fans since breaking out in the 80s. He embodies the honed edge of Texas folk poetry and the refinement of Nashville songcraft. And he’s stayed artistically ambitious across four decades of work.

Like Lower Broadway in Nashville, Memphis’s world famous Beale Street has, as if by some process of natural commercial accretion, grown into an entertainment and tourist destination somewhat removed from its roots music origins. But those interested in enjoying Beale Street as a wall-to-wall blues experience can do so next week, from Jan. 22 to 26, when the International Blues Challenge rocks and rolls for the 35th time.