News & Updates — country & Western

One of my very favorites of the honky/cracker artists, country music star Hank Williams had a soulful delivery and wrote some lasting classics. He came from Alabama and got his guitar lessons from a black street performer named Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne before getting his professional start in Montgomery in '37. He started out on the radio before signing a recording contract with MGM. He became very popular and was part of the Grand Ole Opry for a brief period and made some television appearances. He developed bad addictions to booze & painkillers (he was born with spinal problems) and...

Kentucky singer and banjo/guitar player Roscoe Holcomb recorded some deeply felt, almost disturbing, "moaning" folk music. Bluegrass, old-timey, blues and spiritual songs and a variety of traditional Appalachian folk songs passed down through the generations. Some of his vocalizing comes straight from the church, and some of the songs seem to be improvised. He lived a grueling life of pain, a farmer and coal miner, a tough motherfucker who broke his back several times, they say. He could also handle the fiddle and harmonica. He was recorded in 1958 and subsequently toured to some success during the folk revival, but pain and...

One of the greats, happy birthday to jazz bassist/composer/activist Charlie Haden. He was part of the revolutionary Ornette Coleman Quartet that took the jazz world by storm when they arrived in NYC in the late '50s. He grew up in Iowa from a professional country music family, singing with them until polio messed up his voice. After seeing Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton live in '54 he started playing jazz as a bassist. In '57 he moved to Los Angeles and started playing with Paul Bley, Art Pepper and Hampton Hawes. He was roommate for awhile with bass legend Scott...

Happy birthday to Levon Helm, drummer and vocalist for The Band, bringing classic American roots, country, blues, gospel, R&B, rockabilly and rock into a popular mixture. From Arkansas, he started playing music at a young age, with Bill Monroe as a first major influence. Another early influence was James "Peck" Curtis, drummer for Sonny Boy Williamson II. He started his first band in the mid '50s and was inspired after witnessing early performances by Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley and other greats. In the late '50s he joined Ronnie Hawkins' band. Several members of that band became known as Levon &...

The great Shawnee rocker Link Wray invented the power chord and helped set off the hard rock revolution, influencing punk, thrash & heavy metal with his 1958 hit "Rumble" spawning the future headbanger generation. He made his first record in '55, before heading to Korea with the Army. He got tuberculosis and spent a year in the hospital. A lung was removed and he was told he'd never sing again (they were wrong). So he started working out instrumentals and made several records, some of which were recorded in a makeshift studio in a chicken shack (often in partnership with...