News & Updates — prison songs

Happy birthday to tenor saxophone hero John Gilmore. A long-time member of Sun Ra's Arkestra, a major influence on John Coltrane and an icon Blowing Out Of Chicago. Gilmore started playing clarinet at 14 and tenor sax at 17 and he played with Earl Hines before joining Sun Ra's fledgling Arkestra in '53. He stayed with Ra for over forty years, recording on every single Arkestra record until '95 (including most of the legendary Ra-produced doo-wop sides). He brought a gifted and harmonically advanced style and could play sweet to ferocious, but bop & blues was always his main language....

Country music icon, outlaw poet and one of the greatest songwriters in American music history, Merle Haggard passed away on his 79th birthday, a premonition that he shared with his family. "The Bottle Let Me Down", "Branded Man", "Mama Tried", "Working Man Blues", "High On A Hilltop", "Silver Wings", "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers"...so many great tunes. And his politics veered left sometime in the last 20 years, even recording an anti-war song about the Iraq war. One of my personal favorite songwriters. "Sing me back home..." Sure, some harsh folks can get on my case about liking a...

A birthday shout-out to the Man In Black, Johnny Cash! He was the first "country" artist I ever respected and I always loved his baritone voice and shuffling-yet-soulful '50s tunes. The fact that he did concerts for incarcerated people, opposed the Vietnam war and included topics (and actions) in respect to indigenous culture gave him a lot of real cred, in my opinion. His music had just the right amounts of country, rockabilly, gospel, blues, folk and even mariachi and he totally OWNED that Nine Inch Nails song. There was nothing artsy about his style, just a direct approach with...