I first heard Jaimee Harris’s voice on the livestream that Eliza Gilkyson arranged for the Jimmy LaFave tribute concert in Austin six years ago. Wow, I thought, who is that?
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The scene opens in the backyard of a ranch-style house in the South. A somewhat pudgy young Black man is blowing up balloons. There’s going to be a party celebrating the marriage of his mother and his father’s brother, which he feels is unseemly, considering his father’s recent death. Was his uncle responsible? If that sounds a bit like Hamlet, you get the connection with Fat Ham. But instead of being a tragedy, for the most part it’s a hilarious, albeit provocative, comedy.
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You might call Iris DeMent quirky, with a twangy voice that may be an acquired taste. Her stage presence is as unslick as her unvarnished vocals, as if she has no filter, yet her fans welcome her seeming vulnerability, because she seems so truthful.
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Since teaming up in 2014, the Philadelphia-based singer-guitarist Aaron Nathans and the Cincinnati-based cellist-vocalist Michael G. Ronstadt have managed to record four full-length albums. The latest, Hello World, contains a song that should warm the hearts of baseball fans and lovers of New York City history.
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The Nashville trio South for Winter didn't stop in Florida this winter, they went all the way Down Under to New Zealand, where Dani and Nick spent several years as a duo.
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At a time when clearly Black Lives Matter so much, music also matters more than ever. Songwriters like Crys Matthews and Reggie Harris have found a voice to express what is happening. Now I’ve encountered another Reggie, Reggie Garrett, who makes a profound impression on his fifth album, York’s Lament & Other Stories.
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For the first time in three years, I attended the Folk Alliance International conference in Kansas City. Though not as busy as in some years past, it was robustly attended by a couple thousand artists, presenters, media, and music lovers of various stripes, who were delighted to embrace the folk community again in person.
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Roger Street Friedman took a 25-year hiatus from music to work in the family business. When he returned in 2014 with his debut album, The Waiting Sky, it was clear that he was a solid songwriter. In the time since, the Long Island resident has released three increasingly strong albums. With the latest, Love Hope Trust, he seems to have hit his stride.
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I first heard John Fullbright playing acoustic guitar and harmonica in a Memphis hotel room in 2009 at the International Folk Alliance conference, and I was blown away.
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Long Island troubadour Roger Street Friedman came out of the pandemic with a compassionate collection of songs that matter, about democracy, history, and family, that he's titled Love Hope Trust.
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Nearly 20 years ago I first encountered Pat Wictor and was immediately struck by his supple vocals and guitar playing, his well-crafted songs, and astute choice of covers. He shared those gifts with kindred spirits Greg Greenway and Joe Jencks during their seven-year tenure as the trio Brother Sun. Those elements are all in evidence on his brilliant seventh solo album, Flare.
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Tom Stoppard is regarded by some as the greatest living English playwright. Ironically, like Joseph Conrad, English wasn’t his first language. He was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, but left in 1939 at the age of 2 as the Nazis were invading, first to Singapore, then India.Tom Stoppard is regarded by some as the greatest living English playwright.
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A Wisconsin native, Peter Mulvey became a respected member of the fertile Boston music scene in the mid-90’s. Over the past 30 years, he’s followed his own path, with 19 albums, full of his well-crafted songs and occasionally unconventional covers.
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It had been a while since I saw a Broadway production with unbridled enthusiasm until seeing the revival of Into the Woods at the St. James Theatre.
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Lucy Kaplansky has always seemed like one of folk’s most approachable and down-to-earth, as well as gifted, musicians, with a pure, unaffected voice as a singer and songwriter. Her new album, Last Days of Summer, her ninth as a solo artist, is one of her most personal…
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Mary Gauthier has been known for her honest but sometimes downbeat songs…So the first thing you notice on her new album, Dark Enough to See the Stars, is a shift in tone. No more “the lesbian Leonard Cohen,” as she once described herself. Now she’s Ms. Happy!
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The multi-talented Irish expat Larry Kirwan has been a force in NYC culture for decades. He’s probably best known as the leader of the Celtic rock group Black 47, but he’s also been a novelist, an Irish Echo columnist, a Sirius XM radio host, a political activist, and a playwright with 17 plays and musicals to his credit.
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Willie Nelson is music’s Energizer bunny. Now just past 89 years old, he’s got a summer tour planned, in spite of some pulmonary issues (all that pot smoking will do that)…Now he’s released A Beautiful Time, and it is, in fact, beautiful, one of his best albums in a while, and the New Folk Spotlight of the month.
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Minneapolis-based Sarah Morris has been called a "country-leaning Norah Jones."
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While Bob Dylan has been committed to his Never-Ending Concert Tour for almost 35 years, the Broadway show featuring his music, Girl from the North Country, faced all kinds of challenges getting untracked.
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