News Links – February 25th 2009

Playing cowboy with Willie Nelson

JJ Cale Rolls On

Country Radio Broadcasters Honors Giants of Country Radio

Music you may have missed

Robert’s Western World – Honky-tonk music in style

Big Bender Records set to release the digital version of “Double Wide” by Tornado Magnet

Big Bender Records is set to releases the digital version of “Double Wide” by Tornado Magnet in honor of Johnny Cash’s Birth Day Tomorrow, February 25th 2009, followed up by the traditional hard copy CD to be released Tuesday April 14th 2009!

The new 10 song disc is available now @ all the usual internet down load sites including Amazon, I tunes, MSN, and all fine record outlets like Sam Goody, Universal music, Best Buy etc. Tornado Magnet is right proud to have guest performances on this here new record by some of the South West’s most legendary and notorious Americana insurgent Alt Country Rockers, and includes handy work by past & present member / alumni from: The Beat Farmers, The Johnny Cash Band, The Bastard Sons Of Johnny Cash, Convoy, West Coast Pin Ups, Whiskey Tango, The Hideaways, Hazel O’Connor, & Tony Sheridan bands respectfully.

Y’all can take a gander & preview some of the additional tunes to appear on the new Tornado Magnet record “Double Wide” on this here myspace link below. http://www.myspace.com/thetornadomagnets

The Roots of Country Rhythm Guitar Lesson

Learn how Maybelle Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Harvey, and Riley Puckett created today’s country and folk rhythm guitar style. With video.

Now This is What I Call Roots Music

The Wiyos – Cornbread and Butterbeans

New Contest Coming Soon to TCB

Watch for your chance to win one of five copies of LeeAnn Womack’s new Call Me Crazy beginning March 2nd 2009

RIP Snooks Eaglin

Original Link

BEE BRANCH | Although Snooks Eaglin, the amazingly eclectic New Orleans guitar player who died Wednesday at the age of 72, was truly one of a kind, his music was deeply rooted in the funk and rhythm and blues of the Crescent City.

Blind since childhood and with amazingly long, gnarled fingers and fingernails, he could pick just about anything and was, indeed, known as the “Human Juke Box” for his ability to play nearly any requests shouted out from the crowd, including “Malaguena,” more about which in just a minute.

Snooks never travelled much, meaning that roots music aficionados had to come to him, most often in recent years at the Mid City Rock ‘n Bowl, where he was a mainstay for the last two decades, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, most of which I’m sure he played, usually accompanied by the great bassist George Porter, a founding member of the Meters. The pictures here are of the two at Snooks’ last Jazz Fest gig last year.

My most memorable encounter with the rollicking, rocking Snooks was a couple of years ago when we went to hear him at the Parrish, the House of Blues’ intimate upstairs room on Decatur Street. There wasn’t much of a crowd, so we were able to belly right up to the stage only a couple of feet away from Snooks, who was sitting in a folding chair.

At one point, a young woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if Snooks was “a dirty old man” because he had used a racy euphemism in a song; seems her yuppie date had clued her in on what the word “trim” meant in context and she assumed the worst about the small, bent, sightless man behind the guitar.

“No,” I said firmly, “he’s a guitar player.”

Then I asked him to play “Malaguena,” which I knew was in his repertoire, but which elicited a snorting, condescending laugh from the young woman’s boyfriend. My request did, however, put a smile on Snooks’ grizzled face.

“I learned that song off an old Carlos Montoya record,” he said of the great Spanish Flamenco guitar player. “Carlos could play!

“Burn, Carlos, Burn!” he shouted as he began a virtuoso rendition of the classical piece, which wiped the smirk right off that yuppie’s face.

At least one set by Snooks Eaglin some time during the week has been a long-standing tradition for our Jazz Fest sojourns, the next of which is now only a few weeks away.

But it won’t quite be the same this year knowing Snooks won’t be playing somewhere around town.

Radio broadcasts bring back country legends

original link

When Hank Williams and Bob Wills were making their marks on country music in the middle of the last century, radio was still king. For a country artist, exposure via the airwaves was an indispensable means to commercial success, whether it came through appearances on barn-dance broadcasts like the Grand Ole Opry or by securing a daily 15-minute radio show. New box sets from Williams and Wills of transcriptions – recordings that capture a live performance for later broadcast – reflect that ascendancy.

In late 1950, Williams started doing a weekday show on legendary Nashville station WSM, sponsored by the company that milled Mother’s Best Flour. He and his band recorded transcriptions for broadcast when, as was often the case, they were on tour and could not do the show live.

Williams recorded 72 shows before chronic back problems forced him to give up the sponsorship. “The Unreleased Recordings” (Time Life, released Oct. 28th) culls 54 songs from the transcriptions, and the emphasis is on what we haven’t heard Hank doing before.

He covers songs by his contemporaries: Moon Mullican’s “Cherokee Boogie,” Johnnie and Jack’s “Just When I Needed You,” Roy Acuff’s “Low and Lonely.” The ancient sounds that Williams first heard when he was a child are represented by songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” (done, he says, the way “the old, old timers” sang it) and a slow-rolling “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” There’s plenty of gospel, too (often featuring harmony, unlike his studio gospel recordings), including one of the first songs Williams learned, “The Blind Child’s Prayer,” and the apocalyptic “When the Fire Comes Down.”

The recordings exude an atmosphere of spontaneity; Williams often seems to be deciding to try a song on the spot. The on-air comments and banter of Williams, his band members, and announcer “Cousin” Louie Buck also add to the relaxed feel.

Wills’s “The Tiffany Transcriptions” (Collectors’ Choice Music, released Jan. 27) have been newly reissued as a packaged set, with a significant upgrade in sound quality. Wills and his Texas Playboys made these recordings for the Tiffany Music company, in which Wills had a part interest. The venture’s aim was to sell a series of prepackaged shows to subscribing radio stations, which in turn would sell advertising to air with the programs.

What must have seemed like a surefire moneymaker ended up a dismal failure. The recordings, though, are anything but. In fact, they’re regarded by many Wills aficionados as some of the best he ever made.

By 1946, when the Tiffany sessions began, Wills had slimmed down the Texas Playboys from a horn-based, big-band behemoth to an electric guitar, steel, and electric mandolin-fueled string band with a relentlessly propulsive sound. He continued to draw on his encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary music blues, jazz, folk, western, and more for the Tiffany recordings, as well as debuting new material and digging into the band’s vast existing repertoire. The Playboys’ future country standard, “Faded Love,” first shows up here, as do covers as diverse as “In the Mood,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Tea for Two,” “Okie Boogie,” “C-Jam Blues,” and “Red River Valley.”

As on Williams’s Mother’s Best shows, the band played without rehearsal and worked out arrangements on the fly – setting up and playing, as one participant put it, as if it were a dance. The transcription discs afforded more length for extended jamming than the standard 78-rpm discs used for studio recordings, and Wills’s trademark “a-ha’s,” yelps, and running commentaries were in overdrive. Vocalist Tommy Duncan can often be heard cracking up in response to something his bandleader has said.

In both box sets, the spontaneity occasionally leads to flubs that wouldn’t have made their way onto studio recordings, but that’s part of the charm. These relaxed recordings not only provide a bounty of previously unavailable material, they add a whole new dimension to the music of the Hillbilly Shakespeare and the King of Western Swing.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company

Iranian Country Music? Yup….

Original article

Blues, country music, cowboy boots, and twang: welcome to the ever-widening world of Persian music.
The Iranian band “Kiosk” was awarded the Best Blues Band of 2008 by the World Academy of Arts, Literature, and Media in October (listen to their latest album, “Global Zoo,” here). 

The band began in a basement in Iran, just a couple of friends and a guitar. While American country music is often characterized by a personal story — — getting the wife, the job, or the dog back — Persian country music lyrics tend to revolve around more entertaining or lightly political subjects. 

Sometimes, though, language appears the only difference between the two countries’ genres, as the following music video featuring Mehdi Mafi demonstrates: 

FREE MP3 Raul Malo – Lucky One (coming March 3 2009)

 Raul Malo is set to release his first album of original songs in a decade on March 3rd 2009.  

TCB plans a full review of the album later this week, in the meantime circle that release date on your calander and enjoy this free MP3 of the album’s title track.

Lucky One – MP3 

Raul Malo’s Fantasy Records label debut album, Lucky One, finds him fully shedding his musical shackles. “I have been fighting my whole life against people who want to pigeonhole music. I feel like I’ve got no restrictions anymore.” Malo is known for his work as the frontman of the Grammy Award-winning, globally platinum- and gold-certified band the Mavericks. Following two albums of covers, Lucky One is Malo’s first album original material in seven years.

The CD will hit the streets on March 3rd, fronted by the lead single “Hello Again.”

Malo has earned much critical respect over the years. USA Today applauded “a voice that seems to have no limits of range or versatility.” The New York Times said, “Malo has an exceptional voice, a burnished tenor that harks back to Roy Orbison and the great Cuban singer Beny Moré.” Rolling Stone added, “Raul Malo has a voice on par with the best of ‘em: Sinatra, George Jones and Orbison.” And The Wall Street Journal opined: “Malo’s superb voice is big and melodic with a natural vibrato. Exquisite.”

Malo wrote Lucky One over a two-year period at his Nashville home and was so happy with the results that several of his home demos appear as final versions on the CD. For the balance of the album, he once again enlisted Steve Berlin, best known for his work with Los Lobos and who worked on Malo’s 2001 Today album, as co-producer. “I trust Steve musically,” Malo says. “Art comes first with him. That’s the most important quality of all. Nothing gets in the way of that.”

Lucky One follows You’re Only Lonely and After Hours, two CDs of cover songs written by Malo’s favorite tunesmiths including Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson and Roger Miller.

“How could that not influence my songwriting on Lucky One?” Malo asks. “It certainly had an effect on how I wrote for this. There’s an appreciation for song structure, melody and lyric that these guys certainly had.”

Songs on Lucky One range from the upbeat “Moonlight Kisses,” to songs like “One More Angel” and “Rosalie,” which take on mortality and the loss of life. “Hello Again” is a deceptively upbeat, swinging tale of heartbreak, and the closing track “So Beautiful” is an ultimately uplifting benediction influenced by events in and outside Malo’s home.

TCB Favorite Joey Allcorn on stage with the late, great Don Helms