Normally fronting the incendiary Taildraggers, Tim “Too Slim” Langford has (for the first time in about ten years) slipped away for a one-man-band effort. Employing modern technology to back himself with various acoustic and electric ...

The good news about Robert Plant’s Band of Joy? It’s not a reprise of his mega- platinum duets with Alison Krauss (Patti Griffin is the female vocalist here), it’s not a Zep or Honeydrippers album, ...

Having been compared to everyone from Bessie Smith to Dinah Washington to Diana Krall, Mississippi blues mama Eden Brent summons them all, and more, on her second album, recorded in New Orleans with some local ...

In a deeply satisfying work of self- exploration, Eric Clapton dives into some blues, gospel, pop, and southern-flavored rock ’n’ roll past and present; assembles crack bands on each track that include the likes of ...

The buzz around the debut of Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen is well-earned. A lot of what makes the quartet special is found on the first track, the hard- charging Solivan original, “Driftin’ Apart.” The ...

Coming off White Sugar, one of the most promising blues debuts of recent years, Joanne Shaw Taylor’s Diamonds In the Dirt is proof anew that far from being moribund the genre is in fact being ...

Slowly but inexorably, things are going Carrie Rodriguez’s way. The Mexican- American singer-songwriter keeps making fine records, keeps getting great press, and keeps proving herself a distinctive writer and instrumentalist both. With greater recognition looming, ...

The animating conceit of Donna Hughes’s unsettling new album is expressed early on, in the bustling, minor-key bluegrass epistle titled “Nothing Easy,” in which the artist, one of the most compelling songwriters in roots music, ...

Not quite as stunning as the first volume of the Johnny Cash bootleg series (2006’s Personal File, 49 tracks of the Man in Black alone with his guitar and his memories), this second collection of ...

We most recently heard from veteran Canada-by-way-of-St. Louis bluesman Jim Byrnes via a terrific performance on a Mississippi Sheiks tribute steered by his producer, Steve Dawson. On his new Everywhere West, with Dawson again behind ...

Owing to her Raising Sand collaboration with Robert Plant becoming something of a cultural phenomenon, that Alison Krauss and her superb Union Station band haven’t released a new album together in seven years seems, well, ...

Nineteen-year-old Sierra Hull has been turning heads in the bluegrass world since she joined Alison Krauss on the Opry stage as a sixth-grade mandolin prodigy. Mentored by Krauss and now championed by Chris Thile, Hull ...

From the first electric slide howl of the opening title track—one of several original numbers dissecting obsessive- compulsive love affairs—to the closing “Superman,” a herky-jerky stomp on recent socio-political fiascos, Dana Fuchs offers a virtuoso ...

Following up his 2009 Grammy-winning outing The Crow, Steve Martin, no dilettante he but rather a serious bluegrass picker in his own right, surpasses his previous achievement in teaming with North Carolina’s burgeoning bluegrass giants ...

As in its original 1959 release and expanded 2002 reissue, so in this new 180-gram vinyl edition by Impex Records: The Fabulous Johnny Cash consolidates the strengths that had catapulted the singer to regional stardom ...