If you were around here on the West Coast in the ’40s or ’50s chances are you came in contact with Tex Williams. He was, along with Bob Wills and almost no one else, among the most important Western Swing band leaders in the post war era. Coming from the Spade Cooley band where he […]
I’ve been hosting a radio show this past year or so on the world music webcast, which is actually an Internet show and requires that you have a computer to listen in. However, that is the only up-to-date aspect of the program; everything else about it is an attempt to recreate the kind of radio […]
I’ve been hosting a radio show this past year or so on the world music webcast, which is actually an Internet show and requires that you have a computer to listen in. However, that is the only up-to-date aspect of the program; everything else about it is an attempt to recreate the kind of radio […]
Every year at the Roots Festival, it’s a meeting of old and new, with the kinds of music presented, but for me it’s also a coming together of old friends I don’t get to see very often. Some of them go back to the very beginning and have come back many times. Some of the […]
I’m always curious about how songs evolve, and I guess there’s no better documentation of that than by listening to recordings. Take Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues,” which most of us consider a country music standard. Recorded by Hank in December of 1948, it had been a country song when cowboy crooner Rex Griffin recorded it […]
Tom Waits has a couple of new CDs out and in spots he still sounds like the old Tom I remember from our days at the old Heritage Coffee House on Mission Blvd. in Mission Beach. I was running the Wednesday Night Hoots (that’s Hootenanny) the first time Tom came in and played some time […]
I’ve been hosting a radio show this past year or so on the world music webcast, which is actually an Internet show and requires that you have a computer to listen in. However, that is the only up-to-date aspect of the program; everything else about it is an attempt to recreate the kind of radio […]
Last month I heard from my old friend Bob Bovee that our mutual friend Glenn Ohrlin, maybe the greatest cowboy singer that ever lived, had passed on at age 88 in Mountain View, Arkansas, where he had made his home for many years. It was only about 10 days before his passing that he’d been […]
Russ Hamm and I are starting in on the work of transferring the material in my library to digital format. As I told you previously, the Grammy Foundation gave us a grant to do just that. Mostly the material we will transfer will come from the series of festivals we did from 1967 thru 1987 […]
