Editors' Picks - Music

Clark was heralded in some critical circles as "The New John Prine," who had been hailed, in his turn, as "The New Bob Dylan." There were a few similarities. Songs like "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" had the empathy and compassion for other folks' lives that was a trait of early Prine and "Rita Ballou" had the same dry humor. His Carter-influenced guitar playing was vaguely reminiscent of Prine. But he was obviously Guy Clark from the get-go and he was good enough that didn't have to emulate anyone.

I first heard of Todd Snider in 1998. He started a one-hour episode of Austin City Limits with Ryan Adams' then-band Whiskeytown, and it's a shame it's not available on DVD, because it was something to see. Snider was working with a band called The Nervous Wrecks then with Will Kimbrough playing lead guitar, and they were electric in every sense of the word. It was like being in the middle of a fireworks show.

Borg is deep in the baseline, listening to his demise, the thud of ball to tarp. John McEnroe has just smoked a forehand past the Swede's left Fila sock. A wisp, but a hush, rules over the crowd. A fresh cylinder of balls is decompressed, hissing secrets unvoiced.

Exclusive photos from the finale of our Alabama Music concert series.

In 1958, The Louvin Brothers had an epiphany, a revelation: if God is real, they decided, then, the devil must be real as well. They went into a Nashville studio with producer Ken Nelson and the result was Satan is Real, as gothic-sounding a concept album as ever came out of Nashville.

The address of the small clapboard house we were looking for was 4791 W County Road 924 in Mississippi County, Arkansas—just a mile or so west of the small town of Dyess. From a distance, as you turn off State Route 77 onto the washboard gravel of 924 and see the house sitting on its own, there's not much to distinguish it from other weathered, aging houses that still stand along the lonely rural roads of northeast Arkansas.

The term "historical significance" tends to get bandied about in bootleg collecting circles almost as a warning to neophytes that some recordings ought not to be dismissed on the basis of execrable sound quality. But if near-perfect fidelity is your criteria, you just might miss out on a new take on history, or the solution to some long-standing musical mystery, or how new life can be pumped into an old musical saga. 

I first heard of Mickey Newbury in the early '70s. I was newly married and living in a century-old farmhouse that was supposed to be haunted. My wife, more sensitive than I to the doings of the spirit world, didn't care for it.

An online monthly music column by William Gay.

CDS WE LOVE...in which we cozy up to and share music that has struck our eardrums.

My first contact with the Mississippi Grammys came during a trip to Tunica. An area casino had recently hosted the event—an annual spring occurrence since the spring I moved to Mississippi (2007). Didn't I know? Hadn't I heard? 

I hadn't. Which shamed me, I admit, a little. Then again, the official Grammy Awards come and go each spring without my knowing, either. As a kid, I followed the Grammys. But they descended into circuitous industry curio around 1989, when Jethro Tull beat Metallica's ...And Justice for All for Best Hard Rock/Metal album. A dozen years later, after Steely Dan vaulted Kid A by Radiohead and Beck's Midnight Vultures (not to mention You're the One and The Marshall Mathers LP) for Album of the Year, I waved my TV remote in surrender.

Besides, Grammy live performances always felt like CliffsNotes of the songs they honored: digestible, meant to be palmed. How can music be palmed?

An online monthly music column by William Gay.

Revisiting a lost rap track. 

CDS WE LOVE...in which we cozy up to and share music that has struck our eardrums.

During the Great '60s Folk Scare, a number of folkies who were apparently totally ignorant of American musical history were preoccupied with the question of whether a white man (or woman) could play or sing the blues, while in their midst a few African Americans engaged with American folk music in their own ways: Odetta, Jackie Washington, Julius Lester, Taj Mahal, and Bruce Langhorne spring to mind. Langhorne, in particular, with his guitar filigrees and occasional percussion (he is thought to be "Mr. Tambourine Man") on Bob Dylan's mold-breaking Bringing It All Back Home album pretty much defined what was to become known as folk-rock.