No Depression Fall 2024

American Aquarium • Chet Atkins • Jerry Garcia • Linda Thompson • Willie Nelson The Quarterly Journal of Roots Music

Fall 2024

NO DEPRESSION

“My faith in love is what carries me into the world to face these oppressive moments. Love is pretty fluid; it carries with it matters of compassion, patience, kindness, and those are seldom recognized as weapons in the world of structure.”

Noel Paul Stookey, p. 32

American Aquarium • Chet Atkins • Jerry Garcia • Linda Thompson • Willie Nelson The Quarterly Journal of Roots Music

Fall 2024

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Contents

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30

by Hilary Saunders

Noel Paul Stookey debuts a new instrument to carry along an old tradition

HELLO STRANGER

MUSIC, LOVE, AND MANULENJO

6

by Meredith Lawrence

Children’s books provide a fresh avenue for musicians’ message

GONE COUNTRY

TURN THE PAGE

by Jim Shahen

12

‘MR. GUITAR’

Chet Atkins continues to inspire 100 years after his birth

by Sean Moores

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WHAT WILLIE NELSON CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE BORDER AND THE ‘PROMISELAND’

by Brian Elmore

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A cultural history of country albums by non-country artists

by Zach Schonfeld

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BLUEGRASS’ LIVING ROOM

For 50 years, the Station Inn has been Nashville’s home for bluegrass

by Ben Arthur

56

JERRY GARCIA’S BLUEGRASS SIDE

by Carly Smith

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64

TO THE CIRCLE

How The Great Divide came apart, pulled together, and made their Opry debut with Wyatt Flores

by Josh Crutchmer

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MUSICAL MATRIARCH

With Linda Thompson unable to sing, friends and family lend their voices to her songs

by John Lingan

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CAT POWER

Fantastic Cat’s collectivism makes the roots-rock supergroup shine

by Jeff Gage

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REVIEWS

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CONTRIBUTORS

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SCREEN DOOR

Slowing Down and Enjoying the View

by BJ Barham

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STORE.NODEPRESSION.COM ON THE COVER The cover image comes from a 54ll x 70ll painting of mine titled “The Stick Collector.” The painting is of a memory of collecting sticks in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, this simple act being necessary to start a fire for the group to gather around. The figure and the various shapes that make up the landscape in which they emerge blend into each other, creating a space where there is no separation between human and nature. “The Stick Collector” is currently available for purchase at La Loma Projects gallery in Los Angeles.

— Ryan Dobrowski

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Marcus Amaker Printed in Nashville, Tennessee, by Lithographics Inc. No Depression is part of the FreshGrass Foundation. freshgrass.org ISBN-13: 979898601178390000 ©2024, FreshGrass, LLC

Hello Stranger 5

BY HILARY SAUNDERS

VICTORIA HOLT

I

am notoriously oblivious when it comes to movies and television shows. Growing up, I much preferred listening to music or simply reading to watching screens. If anything, my family and I watched sports together. That was my viewing of choice.

Inspired by the Paris Olympics this summer, which of course will be long over by the time this issue lands in mailboxes, I decided to revisit the ill-fated year of 2020 in order to watch the first season of Ted Lasso. Surely, pop culture fiends have already seen the show, but for anyone who hasn’t, Jason Sudeikis plays the lovable but absurdly ignorant Ted Lasso, who moved from coaching NCAA college football in Kansas to leading a professional club soccer team in London.

Part of the show’s charm stems from the characters’ quick-witted banter and cultural references across literature, politics, and music. But Ted Lasso also dares to broach weightier topics of panic attacks, divorce, alcoholism, broken family dynamics, and colonialism, all set against the backdrop of teamwork through sports.

Throughout the show, the camaraderie of the players, coaches, and staff of AFC Richmond — on and off the soccer field — uplifts viewers and reminds us of what we can accomplish together. It’s idealistic, humanistic, wholesome, and, thankfully, hilarious.

Last year I read a book by New York University professor David Hollander titled How Basketball Can Save the World: 13 Guiding Principles for Reimagining What’s Possible. He takes the original, founding rules of the sport and

translates their relevance from the hardwood to the courtroom, boardroom, town square, and across social and political settings.

It’s basically the book I’ve wanted to write about music one day, but for sports. And in June I impulsebought a new book called Kicking Off Around the World: 55 Stories From When Football Met Politics by Ramon Usall. Though the title seems pretty self-explanatory, I hope it also tells stories about when soccer has impacted politics and how those moments can be models for future policies.

Sports, like music, don’t exist in their own silos. And while we don’t really cover sports here at No Depression, the necessity of collaboration and solidarity of teamwork does run parallel in our field. In this issue, it manifests in the stories about Red Dirt altcountry band The Great Divide’s

reunion and New York City’s rootsrock band Fantastic Cat. Intense and intentional cooperation made the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s special exhibit on Jerry Garcia come to fruition after years of brainstorming and made Linda Thompson’s new album a reality, even after she lost her ability to sing.

Those of us on the outside — who watch sports on our screens, listen to music through our headphones, and experience them both from the audience — will never fully understand what it takes to be on a team or in a band in this way. We’ll never feel the pressure of the Olympics or the awe of walking into Wembley Stadium, whether to play on the pitch like AFC Richmond or to play music on its massive stage.

We’ll never have to depend on each other so viscerally in order to accomplish something so competitive together. But as fans, of a team or of a band, we can always find each other in a crowd — just a logo, chant, cheer, or sing-along closer to harmony.

I’ve always believed that sports and music have a lot in common in this way. Both of these activities, or art forms, have the power to unify people in unprecedented ways. And once people share a common love it helps us accomplish things bigger than ourselves.

These themes resonate even more strongly as we on Team USA face another stressful, contested election cycle this November.

Everyone has to do their part to vote, stand up for each other, protect democracy, and ultimately — as Ted Lasso’s off-center locker room banner reads — “BELIEVE” in the process, and in each other.

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Page from The Knowing, written by Ani DiFranco and illustrated by Julia Mathew

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TURN THE PAGE Children’s books provide a fresh avenue for musicians’ message

by Jim Shahen

C

ultivating a career as a

lyrical raconteur is work aplenty for most roots musicians. But sometimes music isn’t the most effective means of storytelling; a platform other than albums and concert stages is necessary for one particular audience.

Lately, roots musicians seem to be taking over the world of children’s literature. Among those who have penned picture books are Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Rhett Miller, and other authors have set illustrated books to lyrics

by Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. This trend continues to grow, as Ani DiFranco, The Hold

Steady, JD McPherson, and The Reverend Shawn Amos all have recently published books intended for young readers.

From concept to final product, these works reflect a diversity of approaches, experiences, and motivations. But what these artists have in common is a desire to use this form of storytelling to connect with a younger generation, even if it means exploring a medium outside of their comfort zone.

“I love having a bigger palette to use in a way that’s interesting and relevant,” says Amos on writing his two middle-grade readers, the 2022 book Cookies and Milk and last October’s Ellis Johnson Might be

Famous. “Publishers crank out a lot of books, but they work [to promote and sell] them forever. They really love what they do and put kids frontand-center.”

Changing It Up Some of these authors didn’t initially set out to publish children’s literature. Entering this niche corner of publishing came from a combination of necessity and opportunity.

In August, DiFranco released the picture book Show Up and Vote. The ode to the power of democracy is her second children’s release after the identity-centered The Knowing,

which came out in March 2023. If not for the tumult of the early 2020s, it’s unlikely that either of these books would have been developed.

In 2019, DiFranco issued her memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, on the Penguin Random House imprint. After publication, the Young Readers division reached out to gauge her interest in penning something for a youthful audience.

When COVID-19 put her rigorous touring schedule on hiatus, she decided to revisit that idea and “make a book for young people.”

“It started back in 2020 when my job evaporated suddenly, along with so many other people’s,” DiFranco says. “I had to change it up, find a different way of being artistic without gathering people in a room and expectorating all over them. I had to really rethink things and challenge myself to do shit differently.”

The pandemic also impacted JD

McPherson’s first foray into the genre, Socks: A Kid’s Christmas Lament. Like many artists, McPherson took to livestreaming performances and did a series where he played each of the four studio albums he had issued to that point in their entirety. (His fifth album, Nite Owls, is set to come out in September.) It was during the final show, a set built around his 2018 holiday record, Socks, that inspiration struck.

“It was presented to me at the ‘end of the dark times,’” he recalls. “Masks had just started to come off and we just finished our fourth and final livestream. The next day, my manager Wes told me that an editor from Candlewick [Press] was watching with his daughter and thought that there was something there that was worthy of a children’s book.”

While the pandemic certainly afforded Amos the time to work on

his two books, Cookies and Milk was actually almost two decades in the making. In 2011, he had written a serialized memoir for HuffPost published under the same title that detailed life with his chocolate chip cookie mogul father Wally “Famous” Amos, growing up in Hollywood, and his mother’s struggles with schizoaffective disorder.

The original idea had been to turn these installments into a full-length memoir, but the experience of putting it all together was “too painful,” Amos says. In the meantime, a producer optioned his life story with the idea of turning it into a film. The movie fell through, but the idea of a children’s book was presented to him.

“I was divorced and estranged from my son, and my father had advanced dementia. In this moment of feeling semi-sorry for myself, I was feeling reflective, and one specific piece [from the serialized

SHERVIN LAINEZ

Ani DiFranco

9

JD McPherson

memoir] came through — helping my dad open his cookie store,” Amos recalls. “It was this lovely memory inoculated from pain and it ended up being this really nice thing to write, a positive sweet thing where I could look back on my childhood without the tortured aspect. I was able to write a book for my son, who was a middle-grade-aged reader at the time, to show him where he came from, how our history repeats itself.”

JOSHUA BLACK WILKINS

‘A Different Way of Thinking’ Likewise, The Hold Steady didn’t need to invent a story for its upcoming book, Stay Positive: A Children’s Picture Book. The rootsrock band just had to pay attention in a new way while revisiting its past.

Last year, the band released an oral history coffee table book to commemorate its 20th anniversary.

That project did so well that the

publisher, Akashic Books, broached the topic of turning the lyrics of a Hold Steady song into an illustrated book.

The first question, recalls frontman Craig Finn, was which song. “There’s a lot of children in The Hold Steady universe, so it seemed like a cool idea. A lot of our songs are centered on adult themes. … [but] there was ‘Stay Positive,’ and that was pretty much it. We looked at the lyrics and changed ‘it will probably get druggy’ to ‘grubby.’”

The Hold Steady then tapped artist David Espinoza, whom the group met at an event for the coffee table book, to illustrate. For Finn, this process became an interesting thought experiment: “Putting new images on it rather than the images in my mind, it became, ‘OK, can this work also?,’” he reflects. “My experiences writing the song are probably too deep to change my understanding of it. It became, ‘Does

it make sense presented this way?’”

While figuring out how to make their song work as a book was relatively simple for The Hold Steady, switching gears from writing in song to writing for kids wasn’t necessarily a natural process for others.

For Socks the book, McPherson worked off the title song from his holiday album and expanded it into a larger narrative. It required, he recalls, a “different way of thinking” about the material.

“It’s basically the lyrics, but with a bunch more verses and a bridge now.

There’s sort of a magic number of pages for a children’s book, and my first draft was double that. Corporate espionage was involved, there were riots in the streets, we ended up toning down the anti-capitalist messages a little bit,” he says with a laugh.

Structurally, Socks syncs up well with McPherson’s lyrical flow. When it came to The Knowing and Show Up

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“I couldn’t be more sure that young people are the difference in our democracy. I wanted to light a little fire under them.”

Ani DiFranco

book, parlaying her her experiences as a songwriter into a different form.

After publication of The Knowing, DiFranco revisited it and recorded it as the final song of her latest album, Unprecedented Sh!t, released last May. For Show Up and Vote, however, DiFranco says, “I started to repeat the process, but I love challenging preconceived notions. Kids aren’t as deeply ingrained in 4/4 time, so I thought, ‘How cool would it be to make a song in five, since kids aren’t stuck in cultural ruts?’ But I forgot that adults are the ones reading these books to children, so when I wrote it in a weird guitar rhythm and put it on the page, the publisher said, ‘This doesn’t read well.’”

So DiFranco reverted to a more traditional time structure and ended up with a book that she sees as a “tool to get parents and kids engaged about

voting.”

“I couldn’t be more sure that young people are the difference in our democracy. I wanted to light a little fire under them,” she says.

In that regard, the motivation behind the words in Show Up and Vote fits seamlessly into her work as a lyricist, albeit in a format that’s much more accessible to a younger audience than her vaunted songbook may be.

A New Audience For Amos, Cookies and Milk and its less autobiographical successor, Ellis Johnson Might Be Famous, have “opened a whole world” to him as a musician and author, he says. Both books contain subtle references to the ’70s soul and funk soundtracks of his youth. Revisiting those songs has inspired two projects — a third

JOYCE REBILLARD

and Vote, DiFranco had to approach her writing and its intended audience from a completely different perspective.

“I was advised by my publisher, ‘Yeah, let’s tone it down with the metaphors.’ I went, ‘Whoa, OK, that’s different,’” she says. “I had to stand back and think about it, because my whole thing is metaphor and how everything is connected. I live in a world of metaphor, messing with cliches, twisting cultural norms. All that shit I like to do, it doesn’t apply to children. I had to come at it from a different direction to speak to young people who don’t have that cultural baggage and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ I had a hard time until I picked up my guitar and wrote ‘The Knowing.’”

Working out the song musically allowed her to figure out the rhythm and cadence of The Knowing as a

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AFRO

The Reverend Shawn Amos

middle-grade book centered on the history of that music he’s currently writing and the album Soul Brother No. 1, which came out last May and is steeped in the soul-funk tradition and style of bands like Sly and the Family Stone.

“The album wouldn’t have happened without the book. It allowed me to stay in that space, extend my time in that ’70s space a little longer,” Amos says. “There’s a lot of Black history and culture that’s dying, and I have this platform where I can keep these things alive in a bigger way, be a keeper of the flame for Black American music and turn people on to that.”

Just as Amos sees a connection between his books and his music, the Socks book has been a natural progression for McPherson, he says.

“It makes something of which I’m very proud [the original LP] an

even larger project in my life. It wasn’t something I ever planned, but a book was a logical next step.

It’s all part of the same project to me,” he notes.

Since Stay Positive didn’t require The Hold Steady to do much in the way of creating anything new to pull together a book, Finn sees the project more as an extension of where the band and its fanbase is at this moment in time.

“There’s a lyric in the song, ‘The kids at the shows will have kids of their own,’ and there’s been quite a lot of kids born into not just our fanbase, but the band. It’s part of the evolution of rock and roll as an aging art form that crosses generations. It’s something heartwarming to see the fanbase — fathers and mothers with sons and daughters — crossing generations.

It’s a really cool thing and as a

52-year-old, I can really appreciate and see the beauty in having something that touches on all of that,” Finn says.

While “The Knowing” song and The Knowing book came out of the same creative session, DiFranco sees her books as a different endeavor from her music, one that reminds her of what performing means to her.

“It’s not as visceral,” she says of authoring a book. “I see something I made, but I don’t see the reaction and don’t know what it means to anyone. There’s this deafening silence. I’m used to, when the song ends, there’s a visceral reaction because you’re right there when it happens in real time. You hear the gasps, laughs, a palpable energy. A book is very intangible. You go, ‘Did anybody read it?’” ■

A L L I N : U n r e l e a s e d & R a r i t i e s ( T h e N e w We s t Ye a r s ) i s a f i i i n g t r i b u t e t o J u s t i n ’s l e g a c y.

The collection features many never heard before songs, demos, and cover tunes, s p a n n i n g h i s t i m e a s a N e w We s t R e c o r d s r e c o r d i n g a r t i s t .

Available August, 2024

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF MORNINGSTAR MUSIC AND LICENSED FOR WE STILL CAN’T SAY GOODBYE/ A MUSICIANS’ TRIBUTE TO CHET ATKINS

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‘MR. GUITAR’

Chet Atkins continues to inspire 100 years after his birth

by Sean Moores

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N

ashville would not be

the same without Chet Atkins.

He was, first and foremost, “Mr. Guitar.”

That’s a weighty nickname, but Atkins carried it in the same graceful, seemingly effortless manner in which he played the instrument. He was an A-list performer, session musician, producer, executive, and talent scout. As a primary architect of “The Nashville Sound,” a role that cemented his status as a founding father of “Music City, USA,” Atkins helped country music establish a beachhead in the popularity war it was losing badly to rock and roll in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

“He had such a business savvy and demeanor about him that he stood out,” says dobro master Jerry Douglas. “He [would have] stood out whether he had been a guitar player or not. … I don’t think it would have mattered what he did in

life; I think we’d all know Chet Atkins anyway.”

He was one of the most influential guitarists of the 20th century: Atkins won 14 Grammy Awards and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Musicians Hall of Fame.

He won the Country Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award nine times.

Atkins’ work and legacy continue to impact the contemporary musical landscape. As recently as last year, Rolling Stone ranked Atkins at No. 39 on its updated list of the 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. And in April, Morningstar Music Productions released We Still Can’t Say Good Bye: A Musicians’ Tribute to Chet Atkins — a 15-track album celebrating what would have been his 100th birthday that features country, rock, bluegrass, and acoustic musicians interpreting

songs from his career.

“I always wanted to do [a tribute album] on Chet,” says the record’s producer, Carl Jackson. “I always thought he was such an influence on so many genres of music. Not only as a guitar player, but as a producer and a record-label executive.”

Jackson, a Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist, singer, and longtime banjo player with Glen Campbell, has experience with lauding artistic legacies: He also produced the acclaimed 2003 tribute record Livin’, Lovin’, Losin’: The Songs of the Louvin Brothers.

Jackson says that he and Rodger Glaspey discussed an Atkins tribute more than 15 years ago, but the idea stalled at the label level. Glaspey and longtime friend Ken Leister recently revived the idea, and it inspired them to form Morningstar Music Productions to finance the album. As executive producers, they recruited a famous friend — country star Vince Gill — to contribute and

15

perhaps even produce. But for the latter role, Gill recommended Jackson, an old buddy from their bluegrass days.

“He gets the mindset of the musician, because he is one himself.

He’s a great singer. He’s a great songwriter. He’s all those things,” says Gill. “He’s somebody that leaves no stone unturned. I knew he would do a great job.”

Guitar Hero Chester Burton Atkins was born on June 20, 1924, in the tiny town of Luttrell, Tennessee, near Knoxville.

His father, James Atkins, was an itinerant music teacher. His mother, Ida, sang and played piano. They divorced when he was 6. The shy, asthmatic boy was fixated on the

guitar from an early age. His halfbrother, 12 years older, showed him an early pathway to success. Jim Atkins, a singer and guitarist, worked on the National Barn Dance radio program and later with the Les Paul Trio. Atkins’ other early influences included Django Reinhardt and Les Paul. None was more important to his career path than Kentucky fingerpicker Merle Travis.

Like so many Southern boys his age, Atkins had ambitions beyond staring at the backside of a mule. He heard Travis on a broadcast in 1939 and tried to emulate his hero — who used only his index finger to pick melodies and harmonies, while his thumb pounded out rhythms on the bass strings. Atkins’ interpretation, an inadvertent innovation, involved

using his thumb to play steady bass notes and two, sometimes three, fingers to play syncopated rhythms and melodies. Using the extra fingers gave him access to the guitar on par with a classical player. Once he developed his precise, prodigious thumb-picking technique, it became a model for generations of future players.

“When he soloed, he just signed his name,” Douglas says.

Douglas, whose father was a guitar player, says Atkins’ music is among the first he can recall. Gill’s father took 7-year-old Vince to see Atkins perform in Oklahoma City, a formative moment in his triplethreat playing/singing/songwriting career. Their work in music led both Douglas and Gill to friendships with Atkins. They played music with him.

SCOTT SIMONTACCHI

Jerry Douglas

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“He had such a business savvy and demeanor about him that he stood out. He [would have] stood out whether he had been a guitar player or not. … I don’t think it would have mattered what he did in life; I think we’d all know Chet Atkins anyway.”

Jerry Douglas

He taught them, by example, about the important things — kindness, humility, listening.

“He was as good a human as he was a guitar player,” Gill says. “Kind, and always reaching out to young people and pulling them along.”

Of such grace coming from a giant in music history, Douglas says: “He was a normal guy, but it was like talking to a statue.”

Atkins, who is, in fact, memorialized with a life-sized bronze in Nashville, did allow himself one moment of pride, albeit a whimsical one. Later in his career, he began to use the title C.G.P. (“Certified Guitar Player”) after his name in lighthearted recognition of his life’s work. He later dubbed Jerry Reed, John Knowles, Tommy Emmanuel, and Steve Wariner

fellow C.G.P.s. After her father’s death from cancer in 2001, Merle Atkins Russell awarded the final honor to Atkins’ longtime sideman Paul Yandell and retired the title.

Atkins constantly honed his craft. All the woodshedding resulted in a relaxed playing style. If his playing looked effortless, it was because he always had a guitar in his hands.

“I remember one time we were doing a thing for one of the guitar magazines, I think Frets magazine, asked the [readers] to ask Chet questions,” says renowned fingerstyle guitarist and teacher Knowles. “One of the questions was, ‘How do you make yourself practice?’ And Chet said, ‘Is that a real question?’ … He thought a second and he said, ‘Just say it helps

if you love it.’ There was no making yourself do this. He loved to be immersed in it. He wanted to get better. He wanted to meet players who would challenge him. And you could see that in the people who collaborated with him.”

Despite all the hard work, the line to stardom was not straight.

Atkins lost a couple of jobs playing on radio shows because his playing was deemed too progressive. “The Country Gentleman,” as he came to be known, wasn’t country enough for some station managers.

Maybelle Carter of The Carter Family, however, knew better. In 1950, Mother Maybelle, a great thumb picker in her own right, hired Atkins to accompany her and her daughters, The Carter Sisters.

The next stop was the Grand Ole

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Opry. Atkins, who had signed a recording contract with RCA Victor in 1947, was in Nashville to stay. So was his legacy.

Tradition Transmission In his 77 years, Atkins picked his way from East Tennessee poverty to worldwide stardom. He recorded dozens of albums and influenced countless country, jazz, and rock guitarists. He recorded albums with his heroes, like Merle Travis and Les Paul, and with those who looked up to him, like Jerry Reed, Lenny Breau, Mark Knopfler, and Tommy Emmanuel.

The acoustic guitar virtuoso Emmanuel, who is from New South Wales, Australia, had an origin story similar to Atkins’ own: “When I

heard him [on the radio] … I pointed at the radio and said, ‘I don’t know what that sound is, but I must make that sound,’” says Emmanuel, who now lives in Nashville. “And when Chet and I met for the first time in 1980, and he took me to lunch, he told me the same story. … He heard [Merle] Travis play a tune on a live radio show out of Cincinnati and he said, ‘I’ve gotta do that. That’s what I have to do.’ … He told me that and then I said to him, ‘The same thing happened to me.’”

Emmanuel also found solace in the guitar. His father died in 1966, when he was just 10 years old. Soon afterward, Emmanuel sent a fan letter to his hero simply addressed to “Chet Atkins, Nashville, America.”

Somehow, it got there. Emmanuel came home one day to discover that

Atkins had written back and sent an autographed photo. It changed his life. When Emmanuel eventually made a pilgrimage to Nashville, Atkins took the younger player under his wing. They maintained a close relationship for the rest of Atkins’ life.

“I don’t feel like I’m his protégé at all,” Emmanuel says. “I feel like I’m his son, and it feels like he’s my daddy.”

Trading licks with Grammy award-winning bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland, Emmanuel kicks off We Still Can’t Say Good Bye with the lively “Mr. Guitar.” A version of the instrumental also appeared on Emmanuel’s 1997 collaboration with Atkins, The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.

Elsewhere on the compilation

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Vince Gill

‘butter notes,’ he called them. The ones that are too easy.”

Knowles, who collaborated with Atkins on music and instructional materials, can be forgiven for adhering to the original. He wrote it, after all. In 1975, his arrangement of the Scott Joplin piano rag “The Entertainer,” played by Atkins, won a Grammy for both men. He revisits it on We Still Can’t Say Good Bye, in a full-circle moment, with lovely accompaniment from pianist Catherine Marx.

Sierra Hull didn’t know Atkins.

But the six-time IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year, a longtime Jerry Reed fan, was drawn to the melody of an old Reed-Atkins instrumental duet. She got out her guitar and did some nifty hybrid picking with a flatpick and two fingers to compliment a sweet vocal on her tribute track, “All I Ever Need is You.” She sees Atkins’ influence passed down, as musical traditions are,

from player to player.

“I spend a lot of time playing mandolin, obviously, and you think about Bill Monroe and the sort of trickle-down effect that these powerhouse musicians have, and Chet Atkins is one of those people,” says Hull. “There wouldn’t really be a Tommy Emmanuel without a Chet Atkins, and you see the younger musicians coming up by maybe first hearing Tommy, and then Tommy going, ‘Yeah, well if you like what I’m doing, then you need to go back and listen to Chet Atkins.’”

The Nashville Sound Atkins’ musical prowess led to other opportunities within the industry.

He signed an endorsement deal with Gretsch guitars and consulted on their design. Because of his ability to communicate with other musicians, he was placed in charge of RCA’s Nashville studio. Eventually,

JOHN SHEARER

tribute, country shredder Brad Paisley, studio legend Brent Mason, and the dynamic Guthrie Trapp illustrate Atkins’ taste, tone, and touch while adding flourishes of their own on songs like “Windy and Warm,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” and “Caravan,” respectively. On “Yakety Axe,” Country Music Hall of Famer Ricky Skaggs performs Atkins’ biggest hit on acoustic guitar, without a pick, rather than playing the original, electric version.

Douglas, who slides his way through the instrumental Santo & Johnny classic “Sleepwalk” with Bryan Sutton, is sure Atkins would approve of these artists tweaking the tunes rather than copying his originals.

“He already heard himself do it.

He knew it couldn’t be done any better,” Douglas says with a laugh.

“So why do that? He would frown upon [note-for-note covers]. … It would be like Miles Davis saying, ‘Don’t play the brown notes.’ The

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SAM WISEMAN

Sierra Hull

he took over RCA’s entire Nashville division. He brought to the label an enviable stable of talent — including Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Charley Pride.

Jackson probably could have gotten guitarists to line up from Music Row to Kentucky for a chance to play on We Still Can’t Say Good Bye. Instead, he used the opportunity of this tribute record to take a fuller view of Atkins’ multifaceted career. One of those facets was how Atkins (along with Owen Bradley) changed Nashville’s production style in the late 1950s and early ’60s to help country music compete with the popularity of rock and roll.

There’s a well-worn story about Atkins’ response to the question “What is ‘The Nashville Sound’?” He didn’t say something like, “It tamps down traditional elements of country music, like fiddles and steel guitar, and smooths it out with

string sections and choruses behind the vocalist.”

Instead, he reached into his pocket and jingled some coins.

Money. That’s “The Nashville Sound.”

“It built Music Row. It built studios,” says Douglas. “I mean, tape machines cost half a million dollars [back then]. And you get a console … there’s another half a million dollars.”

Atkins might have felt obligated to help rescue country music because his fingerprints were all over rock and roll. He played on Elvis Presley and Everly Brothers sessions, even producing for the latter. Eddie Cochran and Duane Eddy played his signature orange Gretsch guitars. Scotty Moore, Elvis’ guitar player, was an Atkins acolyte.

So was George Harrison.

As a nod to Atkins’ work as a producer and A-list session player on the tribute album, singer-

songwriter Bradley Walker and Gill duet on The Everly Brothers classic “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad).” For that cut, Jackson hoped to lure one more guitar slinger, once known on the graffitied walls of London as “God.” Jackson, knowing that Eric Clapton admires Walker, had a strategy to reel in the British guitarist: Record a track so good that Clapton couldn’t resist once he heard it. “And that’s exactly what happened,” Jackson says. “We threw the bait in the water, and Eric struck at it.”

Never Say Goodbye Gill, who is currently performing as a member of The Eagles, is such a great guitarist that Knopfler once asked him to join Dire Straits. But instead of playing the six-string on We Still Can’t Say Good Bye, Gill wanted to honor his hero with

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something Atkins did much less frequently: singing.

“They asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘I want to sing the song that he sang about a hat,’” Gill says.

“That song moved me. … Back in the ’80s there was a TV show, and he sang that song, and I was in the crowd at the show watching him and they panned to me in the middle of that performance … and I’m wiping away tears. So there was really only one song to think about for me to do for that project.”

That hat, and Gill, are at the emotional heart of the album. The song about it, “I Still Can’t Say Goodbye,” serves as the title track of the entire tribute. Atkins performed the song, about a son missing his dad, as a tribute to his own father.

The legacy continues, as Atkins was a father figure and a mentor to so many artists working today.

The emotion is palpable in Gill’s voice as he sings: I walked by a Salvation Army store Saw a hat like my daddy wore Tried it on when I walked in Still trying to be like him No matter, how hard I try No matter, how many years go by No matter, how many tears I cry I still can’t say goodbye Other forms of tributes to Atkins have arrived throughout 2024: The Nashville Ballet and Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

remembered Atkins on his June 20 birthday with a video dance performance set to his recording of “Jitterbug Waltz.” In July, the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society gathered in Music City for its annual convention, attended by Knowles and Emmanuel and many from a new generation of players dubbed “Young Thumbs.” This fall, artists on the tribute album will play the Opry and take one more chance to say goodbye.

They never will really say it, though. Not fully, anyway. Not until they have played their final notes, and others step into the studio and honor what they have done. Atkins will live through them all, and beyond. Generation to generation.

Player to player. ■

NEW ALBUM AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 27

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What Willie Nelson Can Teach Us About the Border and the ‘Promiseland’ Give us your tired and weak And we will make them strong Bring us your foreign songs And we will sing along

W

illie Nelson’s words

wafted from my speakers as the sun fell below the horizon, bathing Mount Cristo Rey in an orange glow. The rugged mountain, topped by a 29-foot statue of Jesus Christ, marks the border between New Mexico, Texas, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Behind it, the border wall disappeared into the desert. From the highway, I could see the concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, hallmarks of a

cruel immigration policy, the victims of which I regularly treat in the hospital.

I was returning home from a shift and thinking about some of these victims I had just seen. One was small, 8 years old, and dressed in red dirt-strewn pajamas. His family, desperate migrants from Venezuela, were attempting to cross the border and became caught in the concertina wire now flanking the Rio Grande. The child was stoic as I pierced his skin with my needle. I made small talk with the father as I put his son’s flesh back into place. He described the violence in Caracas and the lack of opportunities for his children. “I came for them,” he said, his voice cracking.

Two years prior, I was driving through the dusty Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas, my dog in the backseat and my trunk full of my belongings. I had just graduated from medical school in South Carolina and was moving to El Paso to start my residency in emergency medicine.

Driving through the brown and barren desert, I started to listen to Willie Nelson for the first time in my life. I had never been a country fan, but Nelson’s words and music seemed as natural to the desert as the spiny ocotillo and sotol plants I was driving past. Since then, Nelson’s music has accompanied me everywhere as I have attempted to embrace my new identity as a Texan.

PAMELA SPRINGSTEEN

by Brian Elmore

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Growing up as the kid of Air Force parents, I was used to moving, to migrating. This didn’t stop as I grew into an adult and joined the Peace Corps. My adult life also found me moving every few years to a new corner of the globe, so “home” was a word I struggled with. “Where are you from?” people would ask me. I never knew how to answer.

The border may have provided me with one. It exists as a liminal space, this confluence of two countries and cultures. Home is fluid. “Where are you from?” you ask a fronterizo, and the answer is often

“Ni de aqui, ni de alla” — from neither here nor there. As I build a home here in El Paso, Nelson and his songs have accompanied me and demonstrated what it means to be a Texan. It’s a sense of fierce independence, tempered with compassion, as well as a love and loyalty for family and friends. It’s an eccentricity reinforced by boundless optimism.

Texas, I have come to understand, also exists in the same liminal space of the border. Texas, perhaps more so than anywhere else in this country, exists in this space between

Dr. Brian Elmore drives along the Rio Grande looking for migrants to aid during a trip made by Clinica Hope in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico on June 1, 2024.

American ideals and our American reality.

In my emergency room in El Paso, I treat the traumatic injuries of migrants who suffer from the consequences of cruel and heartless border policies. In Juarez, where I co-founded a free clinic for migrants, I treat those who are still waiting. My soundtrack for this work, a song that provides persistent encouragement, is Nelson’s “Living in the Promiseland,” a track from his 1986 album The Promiseland.

The song steps into that gap between our American values and

PHOTOS BY PAUL RATJE

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American reality. It offers an alternate path forward built on compassion and a uniquely American, and perhaps Texan, idealism and optimism. Written by David Lynn Jones, “Living in the Promiseland” was released in 1986 during a period of controversy regarding migration that echoes current events. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees arrived at the US border, fleeing American-sponsored civil wars and death squads. Farright regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, supported by the United

States, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in attempts to blot out pro-democracy movements among the poor campesinos of their countries. However, the response to this wave of migration, particularly by churches and civil society, differed markedly from that today.

Religious leaders around the country founded the Sanctuary Movement, offering safe haven and protection from deportation to migrants in their churches, despite threats from the federal government. This movement eschewed traditional partisan lines,

On that same trip, Dr. Brian Elmore looks at the dry riverbed of the Rio Grande where migrants camp and wait for opportune moments to cross into El Paso.

as both conservative and progressive religious leaders opened up their pews to these migrants.

The song was a success, becoming Nelson’s 12th No. 1 single.

It was a reaffirmation of American values, expounding on Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, calling for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The song offers a version of America that lives up to the vision of itself as a place of refuge. “Leave us your broken dreams,” Nelson sings, “we’ll give them time to mend.” In the

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song, America is a place where the family I treated, broken by death and violence in their home country, could heal and become whole.

In my time at the border, I have seen how American policies of deterrence fail. There is no amount of concertina wire or Army National Guard soldiers that will stop a truly desperate person from seeking safety and opportunity for their family in the “promiseland.” Nelson seems to understand this when he sings, “The prayer of every man is to know how freedom feels.”

It’s a song I come back to often, listening as I drive home from treating the mangled bodies of patients who suffer from these policies. My emergency room represents the gap between Nelson’s vision of America in this song and the reality of our current border

policies.

Nelson himself represents this contradiction at the heart of Texas, and of America. He is perhaps Texas’ most beloved icon. And yet, the state that has embraced him as its own obviously isn’t paying attention to his lyrics as it continues to escalate its use of cruel and macabre immigration policies. Under Operation Lone Star, the state of Texas has spent billions of dollars deploying National Guard soldiers and state troopers to the border, bringing with them violence and bloodshed. They have deployed concertina wire and razor-lined buoys along the Rio Grande, tearing the flesh of migrants seeking refuge in “the promiseland.” Through my work as a nonpartisan emergency medicine professional, I have spoken to migrant patients in Juarez

who described the rubber bullets and tear gas fired on them by the National Guard.

As I drive home with this song playing, I imagine an alternate America — and Texas — that embraces these lyrics and lives up to its vision of itself as a “promiseland.”

I imagine an America that recognizes the innate humanity and dignity of a migrant. I wish even more that I could bring folks with me to the trauma bays of the emergency room and the banks of the Rio Grande, to show them the blood and gore caused by our policies.

“Is there no love anymore?”

Nelson sings. I think there is. I’m an optimist, and I continue to believe in his version of America. Border communities like El Paso, which continue to embrace and welcome

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migrants, prove to me that this promise still exists.

On Nelson’s most recent album, The Border, released in March, he returns his gaze to this region. The eponymous title song, written by fellow Texan Rodney Crowell, can be viewed as the inverse to “Living in the Promiseland.” Instead of being told from the perspective of a migrant seeking a better future in the promised land, this song offers the perspective of a US Border Patrol agent.

“I work on the border,” Nelson sings, his voice gravelly in its 10th decade, “and it’s working on me.”

Border Patrol agents, caricatured as cruel and heartless, can often fall victim to the same dehumanization that targets migrants. But Nelson interrupts this cycle of dehumanization by examining the

toll on agents carrying out inhumane policies. Many of these agents are locals, tasked with an impossible job by a feckless government thousands of miles away.

In the song, the agent comes home to his wife “with the weight of the whole wide world bearing down on my chest.” Those of us that work in this dusty scrubland are familiar with the weight of carrying this country’s contradictions on our shoulders. I lay awake at night, like the song’s protagonist, reflecting on the violence of the day. The trauma of the border reverberates outward and swallows everybody, migrant and officer, alike.

These two songs, by focusing on the common humanity and dignity on either side of the divide, chart a path forward. At Nelson’s recent

concert in Lubbock, I encountered rednecks, ranchers, hippies, and folks in MAGA hats and BLM T-shirts. No other performer could bring together such an audience, a perfect cross-section of America, in this way. I like to imagine this crowd coming to the border to hear Nelson play, his back to the border wall, and being reminded of the humanity of the migrant, and of who we are and what we can be.

“There’s still a lot of love,” Nelson sings, “and room for everyone living in the promiseland.”

Brian Elmore is an emergency medicine physician in El Paso, Texas. He co-founded and serves as the medical director for Clinica Hope, a free clinic for migrants, with the Hope Border Institute in Ciudad Juarez.

Debut album Whiplash - out now via Yep Roc Records Emerging Artist of the Year Nominee 2024 Americana Music Association’s Americana Honors and Awards “Once in a blue moon, a singer-songwriter emerges that writes so far above what their young life would inform, that it feels as if there is a touch of the divine at work. Jobi Riccio is that kind of artist.”

“‘Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,’ Jobi Riccio sings in ‘For Me It’s You,’ a slow, terse, old-fashioned country waltz complete with a plaintive fiddle. It just gets torchier as that love goes unrequited.”

“Jobi Riccio is a rising star on the music scene” “On ‘Sweet,’ Riccio dabbles with a ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ groove, but vocally inhabits an insouciance towards changing personality traits or personal preferences to please a lover — or anyone else, for that matter.”

“Riccio’s full-length album is a beauty… You can hear her Rocky Mountain past in the music, but the lyrics are modern and personal.”

“When Riccio sings, she hands you her whole heart.”

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MUSIC, LOVE, AND MANULENJO Noel Paul Stookey debuts a new instrument to carry along an old tradition

MEREDITH LAWRENCE

by Meredith Lawrence

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O

nstage, folk musician

Noel Paul Stookey looks as if he’s getting away with mischief. In a way, he is: To perform at 86 years old is no small feat of endurance and luck.

Stookey’s delight emanates from the indefatigable conviction that to sing, and sing together, nurtures the human connection essential to bettering a broken world.

“My faith in love is what carries me into the world to face these oppressive moments,” Stookey says.

“Love is pretty fluid; it carries with it matters of compassion, patience, kindness, and those are seldom recognized as weapons in the world of structure.”

After some 70 years of playing music, Stookey has witnessed more

than his share of tumultuous cultural moments to face with love.

He is best known as the “Paul” in Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the defining groups of Greenwich Village’s 1960s folk revival. Beyond the trio’s work, Stookey has enjoyed a long solo career, and he and Peter Yarrow still perform together a few times a year. (Mary Travers died in 2009.)

In late June, to a concert in Tarrytown, New York, Stookey brought a new friend. The manulenjo, or Manny as he’s affectionately known, is blond and round with a warm, bright voice. In the flesh — or rather, wood — he’s a hybrid instrument that’s equal parts mandolin, ukulele, and banjo.

Dreamt up in Stookey’s playful

fashion, and built by luthier David LaPlante, the manulenjo has a pale, circular spruce body, removable back, short neck, and double steel strings tuned G-C-E-A like a ukulele, the bottom two in octaves.

“I don’t think of it as a combination, so much as a kind of a marriage of these three instruments,” Stookey says.

Although he didn’t set out to concoct an instrument of unity and connection, in the hands of such a revered folk singer, the manulenjo’s symbolism is hard to ignore. And once he started composing on Manny, Stookey’s understanding of what he’d created deepened.

“All of folk music’s imperative has a certain metaphorical perspective on contemporary

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“All of folk music’s imperative has a certain metaphorical perspective on contemporary politics ... and the manulenjo is a dance unto itself of at least three different cultures. So it becomes a metaphor for how perhaps we should move ‘a little bit left a little bit right,’ find a way to compromise.”

Noel Paul Stookey

politics ... and the manulenjo is a dance unto itself of at least three different cultures,” Stookey says. “So it becomes a metaphor for how perhaps we should move ‘a little bit left a little bit right,’ find a way to compromise.”

Each of the three instruments that inspired the manulenjo carries a distinct cultural lineage. The banjo — from which the manulenjo derives its shape and resonance — has a long, often whitewashed history in American folk music, but originated in the African music brought over by slaves. The ukulele — which lends the manulenjo its tuning — is a popular Hawaiian folk instrument, brought to the islands

by Portuguese immigrants and popularized in the United States as

an early Jazz Age instrument. And the mandolin — whose double strings and tone the manulenjo borrows — evolved from an Italian folk instrument that spread across Western Europe; its popularity in the US surged around the turn of the 20th century, when teacher-dealers sold and taught it to large groups before it joined the banjo as a popular bluegrass instrument.

To date, Stookey has written only one song specifically for the manulenjo. “Dance to the Manulenjo” is a self-evident, topical deconstruction of the punitively divisive state of American politics.

Performing it solo on Manny onstage at the Tarrytown Music Hall, Stookey’s fingers fly across the strings, summoning the manulenjo’s

resonance as he implored the audience, and America: If you listen with your heart and if you take the chance You will hear the manulenjo calling us to dance And move a little bit left a little bit right The future could look so much brighter With a little bit of love and a little bit of light We could dance to the manulenjo Stookey’s joy when playing the manulenjo is palpable, visible, and contagious. Grinning as he finishes, he props the instrument’s base on his knee to dip it forward so that the personified Manny bows left and

BROOKE STEVENS

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right to a delighted audience.

“To pick up the manulenjo, I have to confess that my heart goes back to being a 13-year-old playing the ukulele,” Stookey says. “I think it’s a lot easier to reflect if your body is calm and relaxed. I found that humor, or a light approach to life, sets the stage for learning that a certain degree of overbearing seriousness does not.”

‘Are You Famous?’

Stookey often spends time in winter in Ojai, California, a small enclave in the Topatopa Mountains outside of Los Angeles. A few months before his gig in Tarrytown, he met me for lunch at Ojai’s Hip Vgn, a vegan restaurant. We’ve been seated on the edge of the restaurant’s tree-lined yard for most of an hour and no one’s looked twice, until a man stops Stookey on his way back to our table and asks, “Are you famous?”

The question catches Stookey off guard. He initially deflects it before

giving the answer the man is looking for — Stookey’s history in Peter, Paul and Mary. Back at our table, he’s still thinking through the moment. The idea of fame is intoxicating, dangerous, and thrilling. But to Stookey, it’s also fake and reliant solely on the beholder’s personal investment in the answer. “Even when I was used to it, I wasn’t used to it,” he muses. In their heyday, Peter, Paul and Mary appeared at the March on Washington, in Selma, Alabama, and on some of the biggest stages in the world, unflinchingly pushing for human and civil rights with their own versions of protest songs including “If I Had a Hammer,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and “Blowing in the Wind.”

Retaining a rare autonomy in the studio, the trio insisted on making decisions unanimously. They maintained an insouciant simplicity to their approach to music, running onstage hand-in-hand, apparently

elated to be at every show. And focused not on notoriety, but on social change through music.

Outside of the group, Stookey has enjoyed a long solo career. But he first experimented with the whimsy he brings to his act well before he was a folk musician. As a teenager growing up outside Detroit, Stookey learned ukulele, banjo, and electric guitar. In high school, Stookey and a friend devised a character — Smiling Jack McConnell, the ukulele-playing Arthur Godfrey wannabe who gave the morning announcements — and his band, The Birds of Paradise, went on to win a talent show and Ed McKenzie’s Battle of the Champions on WXYZ TV. Stookey’s love affair with rhythmand-blues guitar electric guitar lasted until he moved to New York City and heard a nylon-string classical guitar concert in Greenwich Village. There, in the early 1960s, Stookey parlayed his burgeoning flair for spectacle and an innate comfort in front of a crowd into master of ceremonies work at the

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Grace van’t Hof

Gaslight Cafe and other mainstay venues of the era. He honed a quick wit and engaging stage banter that he carried with him into Peter, Paul and Mary’s performances and his own.

Never particularly content with the simple melodic constraints of folk songs, Stookey often experiments with complex chords (he dubs them “color chords”) and fanciful instrumentations in his own music. Additionally, he has injected levity, humor, and comedy bits into his 19 solo LPs, beginning with 1971’s Paul &. His body of work includes sweet, reflective songs like “The Wedding Song” (a blessing to Yarrow’s first marriage) and “Sebastian,” his personification of the bell cittern on which he composed “The Wedding Song.” His canon includes goofy songs like the psychedelic, funhouse-esque “Desert Island,” “Fun Police,” and “Revolution (1x1),” as well as overtly political tracks like “Nukes R Nuts” and “Impeachable,” written shortly after Donald Trump took office.

Recently, Stookey’s been working on two songs that neatly bookend his immense musical range. The first is a bossa nova that he’s thinking of titling “Bossa Nova – For Mary,” an attempt to capture Travers’ ethereal essence. The other is a cheeky limerick called “My Dog Has Fleas,” completing the common mnemonic device for remembering ukulele tuning. The lyrics are as yet unfinished, but Stookey previews them at lunch: “My dog has fleas / Just on his knees / You can look anywhere else you can please but you won’t find a speck from his legs to his neck.” It might be the next song he plays on the manulenjo.

Hybrids in History The manulenjo is not Stookey’s first foray into hybrid instruments.

Previously, he came up with a harpsichord-like instrument he called a treadle string whose strings were played by individual bows.

Although the treadle string was

never produced, it and the manulenjo both follow in a long history of fanciful, useful, and bizarre hybrid instruments in America. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the development of patent law spurred a spate of instrument experimentation and ultimately formalized rules for many instruments as they’re known today, explains Grace van’t Hof, a musician and hybrid instrument enthusiast.

“All these luthiers were just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would be popular,” they say. “It was some sort of post-industrial revolution patent madness, everyone was trying to get patents on these different goofy, hybrid instruments.”

Among those instruments were a harp-guitar, a harp-ukulele, a basso guitar (a giant guitar with an endpin like a cello), and many quirky banjos.

At the time, banjos were exceedingly popular because they were easy to play and could project through a room and over a horn section without amplification and

DAVID LAPLANTE

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Noel Paul Stookey’s manulenjo, “Manny”

influenced ragtime music heavily.

Luthiers made all manner of unusual models, including banjoguitar hybrids, a bass banjo, a piccolo banjo, a ladies’ banjo, and the banjorine (a small banjo designed to for the lead part in the banjo orchestras of the time).

In 1915, the ukulele arrived in the US for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Within a couple years, ukuleles were available in Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogs and became beloved early Jazz Age instruments. Even as pianos eclipsed their utility, ukuleles remained common in popular music through the 1920s and 1930s.

Van’t Hof even plays a hybrid instrument in the bluegrass band Chris Jones & The Night Drivers.

Myrtle, named after their father’s 1967 Chevy pickup truck, is a curly maple sunburst baritone ukulele whose archtop design, steel strings, and tuning render her closer to a short-scale tenor guitar. By creating the manulenjo, Stookey is in some

way harkening back to the early 20th century’s creative free-for-all, but in a conscientious way, they say.

“It’s kind of like the other side of the coin of all these hybrid instruments that we see in the teens and ’20s, because, especially in the United States, that was early globalism, back when no one was really worried about decolonization,” van’t Hof says. “Through the lens of [Peter, Paul and Mary’s] activism and the folk revival and the music he’s putting out, it’s a really beautiful visual. ... It feels like the tide of progress is kind of rolling out again.”

To construct the manulenjo for Stookey, luthier LaPlante cobbled together elements of different instruments, including a custom spruce top and sides finished in low-sheen, satin lacquer; a banjostyle, removable resonator back; a short maple neck; an ebony fretboard originally intended for a Martin tenor 10-string ukulele called a tiple; mandolin tuners to hold the double strings; and banjo hardware to connect neck to body.

Previously, LaPlante restored and

built several guitars for Stookey, including a 14-fret nylon-string guitar specifically reinforced to withstand rigorous travel, a steelstring counterpart, a small nylonstring guitar that fits in a suitcase, and even the custom 14-fret nylonstring acoustic guitar Stookey played on the steps of the Washington Monument for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

“The overarching experience is that working with him was always interesting ... he would always take me in a direction that I would never, ever have gone in on my own,” LaPlante says. “I suspected that he’d do something really good with it.”

Stookey is still unsure what role he wants the manulenjo to play in his music or others’, but he is in the process of patenting it, which would make it easier for other manulenjos to be produced faster than LaPlante’s custom job. In the meantime, “I’m letting the instrument lead me,” Stookey says. “I’ll be drawn probably towards that which I’m always drawn, which is to find the best bridge between us as peoples.”

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Building Bridges To this day, Stookey maintains a strong conviction that connection — to each other and our histories — nurtures compassion. Both abstract and fundamental in its assertion, such an ideal could be easy to lose sight of.

But instead, Stookey has guarded it consciously throughout his career.

“Music is a progressive art for the listener,” he says. “I think we develop an ear and an appetite and an awareness, and then that awareness builds on another awareness and pretty soon we’re wide open to much, much larger musical formats both lyrically and musically.”

Stookey’s mission is to connect his consciousness to his work and pass it on to others; in retrospect, that he conceived of the manulenjo feels almost inevitable. And Manny’s symbolic unity is in many ways a natural extension of the deep-rooted, expansive belief in love Stookey has deployed throughout his career.

“Personal realization can be either as a lesson to the listener, or as an honest portrayal that invokes from us a

compassion for honesty,” he says.

Reunited for the concert in Tarrytown, Stookey and Yarrow inhabit well-worn roles onstage.

Stookey is goofy and dramatic, hamming for the audience with exaggerated frowns and off-the-cuff jokes. He also gently steadies Yarrow (who is also 86) and helps him settle his guitar strap over his shoulders, waiting patiently when Yarrow speaks about the myriad of world events weighing heavily on seemingly everyone in the room.

As they begin to lead the audience through Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,” Yarrow tells the audience that when the trio formed in the 1960s, singing this song gave them the strength to believe that the ills of the world could heal. Although the progress they fought for appears to unravel nearly every day, the audience sings along to every line. As the song nears its end, Yarrow and Stookey let the audience carry the tune, and begin to harmonize. Yarrow leans into the microphone: “I believe you,” he says.

“We will make it so.”

To continue to believe that a

shattered world can piece itself together requires the wellspring of hope that Stookey (and Yarrow and Travers) carried for more than half a century. Near the end of the concert, Stookey and Yarrow lift the audience to their feet to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” filling the theater with hundreds of voices as the crowd sways and claps along, releasing themselves from seating rows to dance in the aisles. “This land is your land, this land is my land, and as Mary used to say, ‘it still is!’” Stookey reminds them.

Perched on stools a half turn toward each other, Stookey and Yarrow often sing at each other as much as to the theater, and they can’t help smiling. Fiercely connected to each other and their audience, they draw the room in around them for one final song, “Blowing in the Wind,” which the trio first performed at the March on Washington in 1963.

Seated again, the audience sings along softly and as one. Yarrow blesses the moment: “This is a prayer as we sing it; this is an affirmation; this is an act of love.” ■

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GONE COUNTRY A cultural history of country albums by non-country artists

JASON ADAM KATZENSTEIN

by Zach Schonfeld

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“[During] one of our conversations some years back, Beyoncé told me that she’s just a country girl from Texas. As huge of a pop star as she is, at the end of the day, she’s never forgotten her Southern roots. Houston — it’s a rodeo town. Country music, cowboy boots, the whole thing.”

Erick Walls guitarist

B

eyoncé’s country era

began with a vision in the desert. A banjo plays as confused onlookers gather in the desert dust, seeking the source of the mysterious music.

The old men gaze up in bewilderment — recreating an image from Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas — as a taxi speeds by.

The camera then zooms out, revealing a billboard displaying Beyoncé’s image and the words “TEXAS! HOLD ’EM.” With that teaser video — released during the Super Bowl — Beyoncé inaugurated a new persona: Cowboy Carter. On her sprawling album of the same name, Bey celebrates her Texas roots, covers Dolly Parton,

salutes African American country pioneer Linda Martell, and welcomes listeners to a “a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown.” The singer “did a deeper dive into the history of country music,” she explained in a rare statement on her website, and “studied our rich musical archive.”

Beyoncé has spent much of her career as a pop trailblazer, but with Cowboy Carter, she slotted herself into a storied tradition: the noncountry artist making a country album and surrounding herself with country legends in the process.

While many notable examples feel like oddball left turns, like Neil Young’s Old Ways or Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats, others, like Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in

Country and Western Music, substantially shaped both their performer’s career and the country genre itself.

This tradition seems to be in vogue lately, especially among the pop and indie elite. Lana Del Rey recently declared that she’s “going country” with her forthcoming album Lasso, due out in September.

(She tested the waters in late 2023 with a cover of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”)

Similarly, after guesting on Cowboy Carter, the eclectic rapper Post Malone plans to consummate his shift to country with F-1 Trillion, an album featuring country stars like Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen.

Wilco — a band that started in the

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alt-country trenches —recently circled back to their roots on 2022’s Cruel Country, a double album that teases out some of Jeff Tweedy’s most overtly political lyrics to date.

And indie darlings like Angel Olsen and Mitski both swathed their introspective songwriting in traces of Americana twang on Big Time (2022) and The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023), respectively.

(Curiously, Mitski has been performing countryfied versions of some of her older songs, replete with pedal steel and fiddle, on her current tour.)

Tracing the pop history behind this storied trope reveals how country music has been interpreted by outsiders — and the blurred line

between pastiche and authenticity when it comes to this particularly American genre.

Nashville Skyline More than 60 years before Beyoncé went full cowboy, another popular Black musician known for soul music veered toward country. Ray Charles, who’d been a passionate country fan since childhood, pioneered a new style of doleful, crooning country-soul on his landmark 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The record, which includes the swooning orchestral hit “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” proved a major commercial success, challenged

racial boundaries in music, and helped introduce country music to mainstream audiences.

Charles recorded Modern Sounds in New York and Hollywood, but Bob Dylan trekked down to Nashville and set the template for the modern country-album-by-a-non-countryartist with 1969’s Nashville Skyline.

Dylan had already tracked some of his iconic albums (including much of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde) in Nashville, but with Nashville Skyline, he fully committed to the bit, dueting with Johnny Cash, donning a cowboy hat, and hiring a slew of Nashville session greats to back him up.

The resulting album feels like a deliberate retreat from the burden of constantly being referred to as the

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“voice of a generation.” On Nashville Skyline, Dylan eschewed rock and roll and abandoned protest songs in favor of simplistic, twangy ditties like “Lay Lady Lay” and “Country Pie.” He even changed his voice, singing in a warm country croon that was almost unrecognizable.

Harmonica virtuoso and guitarist Charlie McCoy, who played on the record, has no idea why Dylan decided to go country. “He never would talk to us,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was session major, so I’m the middleman between the artist, the musicians, and the producer. …

He’d play a song and I’d go, ‘Bob, what would you think if we did this or that?’ And he’d go, ‘I don’t know, man, what do you think?’ So I told the producer, ‘I’m asking his opinion, he won’t give me one. So I’m gonna quit asking.’”

Yet McCoy has fond memories of the album, as well as the effect it had on Nashville.

“Dylan coming to Nashville was a huge thing for Nashville,” McCoy says. “Because after he came, it’s like the floodgates opened. The folk-rock artists come pouring in there. It was crazy. I worked with Gordon Lightfoot, Manhattan Transfer, Gino Vannelli, Peter, Paul and Mary — I mean, tons of those people! And it called for a need for more studios, and more musicians got to work. It was a great thing.”

A year later, McCoy played on Ringo Starr’s country LP, the amiable Beaucoups of Blues, a kind of bargain-bin Nashville Skyline. “It was fun,” says McCoy. “He didn’t play.

He just sang. But later, when we were all done, he went over to the drums and sat down and we had a whole

jam session.” Nashville Skyline also had a hand in Tina Turner’s 1974 country record, Tina Turns the Country On!, which included a cover of Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You.” Although it seemed like rockers going country was in vogue in the early ’70s, Neil Young (ever the contrarian) waited until the mid1980s to do so. He had already struck AM radio gold with the country-rock of 1972’s Harvest and 1978’s Comes a Time, the former spawning hits like “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold.” But not until 1985’s Old Ways did Young dive all the way in, embracing country both musically and with unfortunate nods to the genre’s stereotypical right-wing politics.

Recorded at various Nashville studios with guests like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the

COURTESY OF CHARLIE McCOY

Charlie McCoy

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“Dylan coming to Nashville was a huge thing for Nashville.

Because after he came, it’s like the floodgates opened.

The folk-rock artists come pouring in there. It was crazy. I worked with Gordon Lightfoot, Manhattan Transfer, Gino Vannelli, Peter, Paul and Mary — I mean, tons of those people! And it called for a need for more studios, and more musicians got to work.

It was a great thing.”

Charlie McCoy harmonica player and guitarist

album is a hokey bundle of country clichés. Young fetishizes the cowboy lifestyle on “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?”, revels in garish string arrangements on “The Wayward Wind,” and proclaims his desire to “Get Back to the Country.”

If the album feels more like a silly costume than a thoughtful immersion, that’s because it came during an era when Young was bouncing from genre to genre like a pop Zelig. He initially tried to make Old Ways in 1983, after confusing his fans with 1982’s oddball electronic experiment Trans. His label, Geffen, balked. Infuriated when an executive described the material as “too country,” Young gave them the rockabilly goof-off Everybody’s Rockin’, after which Geffen sued him for making music that was “musically uncharacteristic of [his]

previous recordings.”

Finally, in 1984, Young veered back to Old Ways, dubbing his band the International Harvesters. He went full country stereotype — performing at state fairs, wearing a headband, spouting pro-America rhetoric (despite being Canadian), and even championing Reagan’s administration. “He literally looked like Charlton Heston had come down from the mountain. It was like, ‘Neil, what’s come over you?’” photographer Joel Bernstein recalled in 2002’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography.

The Old Ways material reflected Young’s newfound preoccupation with family values (“My Boy”) and conservative rhetoric (“Old Ways”). “I think I’m going to be making country records for as long as I can see into the future,” Young told a reporter in

late 1984. “I really believe in country music.”

Within two years, he had already abandoned country for the ’80s rock of Landing on Water. Aside from Young’s excursion — and Elvis Costello’s 1981 album Almost Blue — the ’80s weren’t very amenable to the one-and-done country trope.

Tacky synths and macho metal riffs ruled the day. Bon Jovi indulged a cowboy fetish on “Wanted Dead or Alive,” but didn’t make a full-fledged Nashville record until decades later, with 2007’s calculated, AOR-friendly Lost Highway. U2 sidestepped country in favor of gospel and blues on Rattle and Hum, a guest-studded album whose infatuation with American roots music shares an earnest and scattershot quality with Cowboy Carter. And R.E.M. essentially condensed their country

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era into one song, 1984’s alt-country forebearer “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.”

‘Which Country?’

In the 1990s, a new breed of smartass genre-hoppers flirted with country from a place of self-aware pastiche. Rising stars like Beck (whose early records contained warped country tunes with names like “Satan Gave Me a Taco”) and Pavement (who slipped a pedal steel solo into 1995’s “Father to a Sister of Thought”) led the pack. But no band of the era committed to the we’remaking-a-country-record shtick as mightily as Ween, the weirdo duo from New Hope, Pennsylvania.

By the mid-’90s, Ween had become known for their perverse humor, relentless style-hopping, and

sludgy, lo-fi recordings. They’d even scored some MTV attention for their helium-voiced single “Push Th’ Little Daisies.” Ween’s 1994 album, Chocolate and Cheese, raised their profile and gave fans some idea of what to expect — every song a wildly different genre from the last. Then Ween went to Nashville and made an album in just one genre.

“When they said, ‘We want to make a country album,’ my answer was, ‘Which country?’” says Ben Vaughn, who produced Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats. “Cuz it could be Saudi Arabia. Those guys, you never know. Scotland, maybe? They said, ‘No, a country album!’”

Vaughn knew a little about country. When he was a teenager in Philadelphia, Nashville Skyline piqued his interest. As he recalls, that “was the first time I realized that

Nashville was a place, that there was a studio scene down there.”

As he got older, Vaughn began collecting albums recorded in Nashville by non-Nashville artists. “I remember seeing a Buffy SainteMarie album she recorded there.

Joan Baez recorded in Nashville,” Vaughn says. “I was like, Oh. All these radical leftist folkies are recording in a town that you would think would be very conservative. It really intrigued me, that these weirdos were going down there.”

By 1995, Vaughn was a record producer with experience in Nashville, having produced countrysoul musician Arthur Alexander’s Lonely Just Like Me there in 1993.

When Ween approached him about making a country album, he offered some advice. “I said, ‘Well, if you really wanna do this the right way, we

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PATRICK JORDAN

Ween with Shit Creek Boys live at the Ryman Auditorium in 2018

go to Nashville, and we book Bradley’s Barn. And we book the A-list guys who played on Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison records and all that stuff. Because they’re just about ready to retire and start collecting their pensions.’”

Gene and Dean Ween (Aaron Freeman and Michael Melchiondo) did exactly that, trekking to Nashville and assembling a dream team of session greats, including harmonica player Charlie McCoy, drummer Buddy Harman, pianist Bobby Ogdin, and vocal group The Jordanaires (who had sung for Elvis Presley), to play on raunchy originals like “Piss Up a Rope” and “Mister Richard Smoker.” (Vaughn warned the musicians ahead of time about the nature of the material; one player pulled out, saying he was a deacon in his church.)

“Those guys were cool!” McCoy exclaims when asked about Ween. “I couldn’t believe these young people from — where are they from, Pennsylvania? — I couldn’t believe the knowledge and background they had with country music. They must have really been listening and studying up on it.”

While it lacks the abrasive sonics and zany eclecticism of Ween’s best work, 12 Golden Country Greats walks a compelling tightrope between irony and sincerity. It offers a twangy warmth and grizzled professionalism that Ween never could have achieved at home on their Tascam 4-track. The album almost feels like a postmodern parody of the cultural trope of the country album, right down to its jokey title (there are just 10 songs). It’s less a country album than a concept album about

making a country album.

Dean and Gene happily played along with all the clichés. “I said to them, ‘Well, if we’re gonna do this right, you’re not allowed to play on your own record,’” Vaughn recalls.

“And they said, ‘Dude! We’ve always wanted somebody to do that to us!’”

And so Deaner and Gener, as they’re often called, stayed in the vocal booth and served more as conceptual visionaries than musicians, letting the professionals handle the instruments.

According to Vaughn, Elektra wasn’t amused when Ween turned in the album. “They didn’t know if it was a put-on,” Dean Ween recalled in a 2017 interview with Stereogum. “I think they thought it was our way to get out of the deal, which wasn’t the case at all. It was something we were proud of and love.”

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The label grudgingly released the album as-is in the summer of 1996. “’Cause Ween did what the contract said. They delivered a new album,” Vaughn says. “It didn’t say in the contract you’re not allowed to deliver a country album.”

Digging Deeper In the 2010s, a new cohort of pop singers began flirting with country during an era when genre barriers seemed more malleable than ever.

Lady Gaga mingled Americana, softrock, and country on her 2016 album Joanne, adding a hint of twang to her voice on the uncharacteristically stripped-down title track. The following year, Miley Cyrus (whose father is Billy Ray Cyrus and whose godmother is Dolly Parton) pivoted to a country-pop style on Younger Now, with limited success. While tracks like “Malibu” helped Cyrus

distance herself from the provocateur image from her early 20s, the album’s slick, sanitized melding of styles failed to impress critics.

In retrospect, those releases were just warmup for the full-scale pop embrace of country that’s been happening in recent months. There’s evidence that the early pandemic pushed country fans to embrace streaming, as they were listening at home instead of mid-commute. In a recent Slate essay, critic Carl Wilson pointed to Luminate data that showed country audio streaming rising by more than 50% between 2019 and 2022. He also argued that younger fans fell in love with country thanks to the popularity of stars like Morgan Wallen (and likely Kacey Musgraves among the more liberal, urban demographic).

Meanwhile, in 2019, Lil Nas X’s viral smash “Old Town Road” — and

its subsequent disqualification from Billboard’s Hot Country chart — sparked a cultural conversation on the marginalization of Black musicians in the country space. Like Beyoncé, Lil Nas X positioned himself as a Black cowboy in a predominantly white popular culture.

That set the stage for a larger project of celebrating the unheralded Black progenitors of American roots music. It was never going to be easy.

As the scholar Francesca T. Royster wrote in her 2022 book Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, “Country music has made room for its white male country outlaws, even if it doesn’t always make room for outspoken Black women.”

Which brings the trend back to Cowboy Carter.

Unlike most of these previous out-of-left-field country albums, Cowboy Carter is part of a larger,

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ongoing project for Beyoncé. It’s billed as “Act II” in a planned trilogy, with each entry seemingly honoring the Black originators of a different genre. While 2022’s Renaissance paid homage to the Black and queer roots of house and dance music, Cowboy Carter acknowledges the historic Black roots of country, paying tribute to living legends like Linda Martell, an early African American country musician whom Bey introduces to younger listeners with “Spaghettii” and “The Linda Martell Show.”

Indeed, Black musicians were at the heart of country music long before white stars like Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell popularized it for mainstream audiences. As banjoist (and Beyoncé collaborator) Rhiannon Giddens wrote in an essay for the Guardian, earlier this year, “We would not have any of what we call country without the history of

the Black string band musicians, who helped form the nexus of American music for 100 years or more before record players.”

Significantly, Beyoncé instills Cowboy Carter with an understanding of the reductive and often racist construct of genre itself, something the artist has been keenly aware of since the hostile reception she received at the 2016 CMA awards for performing with such genreblurring confidence alongside The Chicks. As Martell herself intones during one of the record’s interludes, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” On this album, covers of The Beatles and Dolly Parton coexist, and bluegrass pastiche and flamenco experiments are sprinkled in. Country and soul swirl together, as they did in the 1960s thanks to artists like Ray Charles and Bobbie Gentry.

“Country music is akin to the

blues and gospel music as one of the American forms of music,” says Erick Walls, a veteran guitarist who has performed with Beyoncé on and off over the past decade, including at those infamous CMA Awards. “And at the core of it, just like in blues and gospel, there are people of color — African Americans — who were the architects of this.”

Beyoncé’s pivot to country may seem like a curveball and a wild stylistic departure, but the genre also reflects her personal roots. “[During] one of our conversations some years back, Beyoncé told me that she’s just a country girl from Texas,” says Walls.

“As huge of a pop star as she is, at the end of the day, she’s never forgotten her Southern roots. Houston — it’s a rodeo town. Country music, cowboy boots, the whole thing.

“These are her roots,” Walls adds.

“This is a homecoming for her.” ■

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BLUEGRASS’ LIVING ROOM

For 50 years, the Station Inn has been Nashville’s home for bluegrass

by Ben Arthur

JIM MCGUIRE

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The Time Jumpers outside the Station Inn in 2012

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W

hen Steve Earle

moved to Nashville in 1974, it had just begun blossoming into the city we know today.

Sure, there was the Grand Ole Opry and some venues around, but it was a ghost town compared to today’s music scene.

“There was no place for an electric band to play there,” Earle recalls with a wistful smile. “There was hardly anyplace for singer-songwriters to play, which sounds weird now, but there was one or two places … and then bluegrass was, you know, it was the Station Inn.” Opening the same year he arrived, the venue that would rise into the cultural mecca of bluegrass was

simply a house in West Nashville where a group of pickers gathered.

Looking for a sense of community, Earle and his famed circle of Texan folksters ran adjacent to that crowd.

“Besides us, the other group of weirdos was a long-haired bluegrass contingent that John Hartford had out there,” he says. “Culturally, it was something I gravitated towards because they were like me, but they were way better players. And I was intimidated by it.”

In 1978, the gathering moved closer to downtown, into the spot where it has grown into the monolith it is today. Slowly, national bands trickled in, while locals used it as a testing ground for new and inventive styles of bluegrass. It remained the

center of a community, and the venue never lost sight of that.

Today, the storied Station Inn still sits on the same lot. It’s unassuming from the outside — simply a stonewalled, square building with a small sign out front. Walk inside and it’s as if nothing has changed. Fraying posters and neon beer signs are tacked on its pine walls. The aging soundboard sits in the back. In the corner, portraits of greats like John Hartford, Tony Rice, and Bill Monroe keep watch on visitors. Beer is the only alcohol served, and it comes out of old refrigerators papered with novelty bluegrass stickers. Famously, the seats from Flatt and Scruggs’ tour bus sit in the corner, though they’ve probably been reupholstered too

DANNY CLINCH

Steve Earle

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many times to count.

There’s something indefinable about the Station Inn. It’s weathered many changes to the music as well as to its own management over the years, but even now it stands in defiance of the luxury hotels and tourist attractions that surround it.

There’s still an authenticity to the place after 50 years, one that hinges on pure admiration for bluegrass music.

A Local Hangout From 1974 to 1978, the Station Inn was a house located off a side street near Vanderbilt University and Centennial Park. It was spearheaded by a group of seven local pickers —

Red and Bird Lee Smith, Bob and Ingrid Fowler, Charmaine and Marty Lanham, and Jim Bornstein — as a place for them to play bluegrass. In its first incarnation, only the house band played; there were no other acts. As music journalist and longtime patron Robert K. Oermann recounts, “It was just them. They were the club.”

But still the crowds came, as the venue gained a reputation of being underground, heady, and truly committed to bluegrass music. While other venues in town catered to the bar crowd, the Inn remained solely dedicated to the music, no matter how informal or haphazard the jam session was.

“When we bought it, it was a beer joint with a house attached to it,”

Bornstein said in True Life Bluegrass, a 2004 documentary on the venue.

“We filled the first room up with four or five tables we found on 2nd Avenue and chairs that didn’t match. Next week, we’d go and tear out another wall. Same thing until we gutted the whole house. And we still couldn’t get them all in — it was a phenomenal thing.”

In the summer of 1978, the Station Inn moved to its current location — the small, one-story building in The Gulch, a then-uninhabited part of town near the train depot.

According to local legend, the building previously held a Black juke joint where artists like James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner played.

“I remember when the stage was

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in the corner, in the far-left corner,” Jerry Douglas recalls with a chuckle.

“It was a small stage — one you could fall off of, depending on how much free beer you had consumed that evening.”

The venue remained a local hangout, giving Nashville bluegrass bands a place to showcase their talents. One of those local pickers was JT Gray. After moving to Nashville in 1971, he started playing with The Misty Mountain Boys and became entrenched in the local bluegrass scene. In the following decade, he split time with his own band, Nashville Skyline, and side gigs with some of the greats like Tom T. Hall, Vassar Clements, and The Sullivan Family. In 1979, he hit the road with Jimmy Martin and even played bass on his collaborative record with Ralph Stanley.

Ownership changed a number of times after the venue moved to 12th

Avenue South, and Gray bought the Station Inn in 1981. He wanted another way to stay in the bluegrass scene, but almost immediately experienced a bout of slow business.

At times, he had to drive Clements’ tour bus for extra money to keep the venue afloat. The Station Inn flew under the radar until 1982, when Gray was approached by famed bluegrass manager Lance Leroy. Known for working closely with Lester Flatt, Leroy had begun promoting a litany of bluegrass bands after Flatt died.

This time, he had a new act from Los Angeles, The Bluegrass Cardinals, whom he wanted to play at the Station Inn. Gray accepted and invited them as the venue’s first “outside band.”

They performed to a sold-out crowd, and the next night, Country Gazette played. The venue began booking more national acts, and the rest is history.

In this way, the Station Inn filled a

hole in Nashville’s bluegrass scene. In the 1960s and ’70s, national acts mostly played at festivals, while local bands stuck to smaller clubs.

However, with Gray’s booking expertise, things changed. In a 2007 interview with Bluegrass Unlimited, he explained, “People wanted to see more of that, but they didn’t have a chance in Nashville, because there weren’t any festivals around. You had to go two-three hundred miles to hear music, as far as a festival is concerned.”

Quickly, a star-studded cast began to form around the Station Inn. The Whites began playing there. Bill Monroe became a regular guest, often sitting in with whomever was playing that night. Musicians from across the country flocked to play at the venue. At the same time, a new generation of bluegrass artists rose up, struggling and shifting with the heavy legacies of the past. They brought something

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Peter Rowan

new to the conversation, taking other genres and weaving them into the structure of bluegrass. Some, like Béla Fleck, took inspiration from jazz.

Others simply wanted to find their own way in the genre.

“Just in the smaller bluegrass circle, you had a bunch of innovators coming up,” says Peter Rowan. “You had the Nashville Bluegrass Band, you had Béla Fleck, you had Jerry Douglas. It was exciting, and I was an outside influence, coming in from left field in a way. It was a very exciting time to see what people were going to step out of their career.”

AMANDA ROWAN

A Stage for Something New Some nights, musicians would hold standing residencies as a way to try out new ideas or simply mess around with friends. Rowan took that opportunity to infuse bluegrass with other genres like rock, reggae, and the

blues. His group was an inventive concept and one that drew in some of the best artists in Nashville.

“We would do these things in there. Crucial Country, we’d call it,” Douglas recounts. “He was doing Rolling Stones songs and … a lot of Bob Marley, and all these other kinds of music that were not bluegrass, but we were finding a way to make our instruments work over those chord changes. It was eye-opening for us to play a different kind of music, but Peter started that thing. He was the catalyst.”

In the ’60s, Rowan began his career in Nashville as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, but later he moved to the West Coast, working with John Cale and David Grisman in a psych-rock band, recording Tejano music with Flaco Jiménez, and performing with Jerry Garcia as Old & In The Way. “When I came back down there in the ’80s, things had changed,” he says.

“We were all from different walks in our musical careers. I had been out West, playing a kind of hybrid country kind of thing. But when I got back into town, the Station Inn was open. So it was like, ‘Okay, here’s a place to play bluegrass,’ so we started doing a jam session. A bunch of different people showed up: David Allan Coe was looking for different sounds at the time, John Prine became a regular guest, and a revolving core band with Sam Bush, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, and the like. It was a good time.”

In a short time span, Crucial Country led other groups to hold residencies, some more serious than others. Wednesday nights featured the Ass Hairs, simply a chance for artists to let loose and mess around.

The group, led by Ed Dye, would throw flour, doughnuts, beer, and anything else on hand at the crowd.

Always an impromptu gathering, Dye would call up a group of players and

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Chris Eldridge

Eldredge played with The Osborne Brothers, Jimmy Campbell played with Bill Monroe, Mike Bub and Ronnie and Rob McCoury with The Del McCoury Band, and Larry Perkins and Mike Compton were out with John Hartford. But on Tuesday nights, they were down at the Station Inn. “It was a no-pressure thing for them, you know? They were all touring musicians … so it was just a reason to get together when you’re at home and play more music, and more than anything, have fun,” says Casey Campbell, mandolin player and son of Jimmy Campbell.

“It was really a dream come true to move somewhere from Arizona to a place that was like being at a bluegrass festival every night,” Bub says. “It became my second home.”

“There wouldn’t be The Mountain without The Sidemen,” Earle says, referring to his 1999 bluegrass album with The Del McCoury Band.

“For a year, I was writing those songs, and that’s where I tried them out. It was welcoming. It wasn’t weird.

Bluegrass could be really snobby … and there’s some people that didn’t appreciate the way I roll. And I get it, but that’s the way that I am. JT Gray was not one of them. I always felt welcome walking into the Station.”

Just a few years later, in the early 2000s, The Time Jumpers started holding a regular gig at the Station Inn. It began as a spontaneous affair — just a revolving group of Nashville greats including session musicians, as well as Vince Gill and Ranger Doug of Riders in the Sky, playing Western swing music for fun.

Although they weren’t strictly bluegrass, Gray was always open to any kind of roots music.

The Future of Bluegrass Chris Eldridge first moved to Nashville in 2004, right before The Gulch was developed. At first, he came to the Station Inn to see bands like The Sidemen and The Hot Club of Nashville. In January 2005, Eldridge, Chris Pandolfi, and Andy Hall started testing out material for a new group

COURTESY OF RED LIGHT MANAGEMENT

perform with anyone that was in town.

“We were messy,” participant Douglas says with a snicker. “I remember Paul Kraft was singing ‘Dropkick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)’ and Alan O’Brien from the Nashville Bluegrass Band had a bag of Martha White flour sitting in the corner of the stage.

And about the third time he sang, ‘Dropkick me, Jesus,’ Alan kicked that bag of flour. And we all thought we were dead! It was so white, you couldn’t see. The whole room was white.”

“They’re like a big party,” Tim O’Brien says. “The one that I went to was the nose-and-glasses night and everybody had glasses with big noses on. It was quite a spectacle.”

Throughout the ’90s, many other groups held longstanding residencies, most notably The Sidemen. Made up of artists who toured with other bands, gigs as The Sidemen offered a way to perform during their off days. On the weekends, Gene Wooten and Terry

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COURTESY OF NASHVILLE CONVENTION VISITORS CORP.

Vintage neon and signs Inside of the Station Inn

that would come to be The Infamous Stringdusters. “[We] played at the Station Inn probably under five different names in the early days,” Eldridge says. “But people still knew it was us.” A few years later, in 2007, Eldridge would get together with Chris Thile, Noam Pikelny, Gabe Witcher, and Greg Garrison to form Punch Brothers.

Like the generations before them, they came up in bluegrass but looked to jazz for inspiration, pushing the form forward. They challenged audiences’ perceptions of bluegrass, creating avant-garde pieces like “The Blind Leading the Blind” from their 2008 debut album, Punch, that were more aligned with classical compositions than anything Bill Monroe ever did.

“It was our second gig, but the debut under the name Punch Brothers was at the Station Inn. We did three nights,” Eldridge says. “You know, we were playing music that was so radical, even by the standards of the rest of the band’s catalog. We were playing this 40-minute, through-

composed piece that Thile wrote, which was asking a lot of an audience.

I think we really did want to play at the Station Inn because we were feeling that bluegrass was an important part of where we were coming from. I think it felt somehow appropriate because we knew we were coming off of that tree.”

Around this time, the Station Inn’s surroundings began to shift. The city began catering to tourists and out-oftowners. High-end restaurants and breweries popped up around The Gulch’s train tracks. Luxury hotels rose into the skyline. By 2021, the instrument company Gibson had moved its flagship store to the neighborhood.

In March of that year, there was another seismic shift in the Station Inn’s community: Gray passed away at 75 years old. For 40 years, he had run the venue and seen the ups and downs of bluegrass, arguably more than anyone in the city. Just a few days before he passed, he appeared on a broadcast of the 2021 Grammy Awards in a segment dedicated to

iconic music venues. “Bluegrass music is like one big happy family,” he said during that broadcast, and if that was the case, then the Station Inn was the family’s living room.

In the months following his death, longtime player and patron Joshua Ulbrich took over. Little has changed since then: Those same tattered posters and neon beer signs still inhabit its walls. It still seats only 175 people, first-come, firstserve. It still only serves beer, popcorn in a coffee filter, and what many lovingly call the worst pizza in town. The Station Inn is, by all measures, an anachronism. It isn’t dedicated to making money, or radio broadcasts, or asserting its own legacy; it exists simply for the music.

“I know the new bands that are coming up are probably stopping in there, the same as we did,” Douglas says. “You know, it’s still all happening, it just proves that they don’t need us to do it. There’s always a new graduating class coming through.” ■

JERRY GARCIA’S BLUEGRASS SIDE

BY CARLY SMITH

PHOTOS BY SUSANA MILLER

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57

E

arlier this year, the

Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum opened a new exhibition titled Jerry Garcia: A Bluegrass Journey.

Focusing on Garcia’s bluegrass roots and devotion to the banjo, the exhibit traces his early days as a budding banjoist, his time with the landmark bluegrass supergroup Old & In the Way, and his many bluegrass collaborations.

In the early 1960s, before The Grateful Dead began, Garcia found himself at the center of the Bay Area bluegrass scene, often partnering

with lyricist Robert Hunter, who became a lifelong musical partner.

Bluegrass legends like Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Jim & Jesse, The Stanley Brothers, and The Kentucky Colonels were at the core of Garcia’s development as a musician. He began picking regularly with members of the close-knit bluegrass community in Northern California such as David Nelson, Eric Thompson, Sandy Rothman, and many others.

While the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum’s primary exhibit space focuses on the history

of the genre, temporary exhibit galleries take a deeper look at artists, side stories, and more. In early 2019, the idea of exploring Garcia’s bluegrass roots took shape when jamgrass legends Leftover Salmon played a concert in the museum’s theater. Vocalist and guitarist Vince Herman toured the museum with his friend, artist manager Cliff Seltzer, who offered to join the exhibition team. In early 2021, the project became a reality through supportive funding from the Daviess County Fiscal Court in Owensboro, Kentucky.

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With the project in development, initial connections with longtime Grateful Dead publicist and historian Dennis McNally, as well as Garcia’s first wife, Sara Ruppenthal Katz, were crucial. McNally and Brian Miksis had recently unearthed some early recordings of Garcia’s work in bluegrass and released a box set, Before the Dead, in 2018. Katz, also an early musical collaborator with Garcia, supported the exhibition’s development and the search for artifacts to help tell this story.

Garcia’s personal bluegrass instrument collection was important to the exhibition, and through a collaboration with Garcia’s family, 12 of his instruments, including seven banjos, a mandolin, a 1904 Martin D-18, an autoharp, and a pedal steel guitar, are on display.

Garcia remained devoted to bluegrass throughout his career, even beyond the launch of The

Grateful Dead in 1965. He delved into bluegrass side projects through his own supergroup, Old & In the Way; produced the 1976 album Pistol Packin’ Mama, featuring Don Reno, Chubby Wise, David Nelson, Frank Wakefield, and Pat Campbell; and started the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band with Nelson Sandy Rothman, Kenny Kosek, John Kahn, and David Kemper. In the late 1980s, Garcia reconnected with his old friend David Grisman, who recorded many of their sessions at his home studio.

The Pizza Tapes, as they came to be known, were released in 2000, five years after Garcia’s passing, and are now celebrated as an entry point for bluegrass fans.

As Garcia’s second wife, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia said in a video interview that is part of the exhibit, “He loved his banjo, and it was hard to go out on the road with The Dead and do a tour. He’d come

home and put the guitar down and go get his banjo. He’d pick while sitting on the couch and look out the window.”

Jerry Garcia: A Bluegrass Journey will be on display at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum through March 2026.

Visitors can trace Garcia’s bluegrass career through exclusive interview clips, interactive displays, and several artifacts in addition to his instruments, including rare photographs, clothing, and his personal record collection.

Exclusive images of and from the exhibit have been shared with No Depression with permission. For more information about the museum and this exhibition, visit bluegrasshall.org.

Carly Smith is the curator at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.

PHOTO BY RODNEY ALBIN, SARA KATZ COLLECTION.

The Hart Valley Drifters perform on the College of San Mateo Folk Festival stage on Nov. 10, 1962.

From left, David Nelson, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Norm Van Maastricht.

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SUSANA MILLMAN

Jerry Garcia in 1991

BLUEGRASS MUSIC HALL OF FAME & MUSEUM

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JOE NOVAKOVICH, SARA KATZ COLLECTION

Jerry Garcia playing fiddle, and Sara Katz playing guitar at the Top of the Tangent in May 1963.

CHRIS STEGNER

HANK KRANZLER, SARA KATZ COLLECTION

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Theodore Roszak and his daughter, Robert Hunter, David Nelson, and Jerry Garcia at Jerry and Sara’s wedding on April 23, 1963.

SHERRI NELSON

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PHOTOS BY BLUEGRASS MUSIC HALL OF FAME & MUSEUM

The Wildwood Boys perform during the amateur band competition at the Monterey Folk Festival in May 1963. From left, Ken Frankel, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, David Nelson.

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The Great Divide

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TO THE CIRCLE How The Great Divide came apart, pulled together, and made their Opry debut with Wyatt Flores

by Josh Crutchmer

SIERRA HANEY

O

n a sweltering July

afternoon in Little Rock, Arkansas, Mike McClure tried to cool down the tour bus with a serenade.

“He’s standin’ on a piece of the Ryman, look at him now!” McClure sang, over and over, in the front lounge, in front of his bandmates in the Red Dirt country rock band The Great Divide. Each time he did, someone would answer the call with a “Yeah, he is!” response.

McClure was quoting the 1992 Gary P. Nunn song “Standing on a Piece of the Ryman,” which references the circle in the middle of the Grand Ole Opry stage that was cut from the original stage at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. The night before, McClure had stood in that hallowed circle for the first

time, flanked by the rest of The Great Divide. After three decades as a band, and with the help of major label country star-in-the-making Wyatt Flores, they had finally played the Opry.

In Little Rock, as their crew loaded in for a show at The Rev Room, the five-piece Divide basked in the memories of their Opry debut the night before.

“I had no idea what to expect,” McClure says. “I just hadn’t really thought about it. But, once you step in there, and once you see that circle and the pictures on the wall — and you see what a wellpreserved history of country music it is, you feel it. I really felt it. The way it’s laid out, with the balcony up high above you, once you’re on stage, it’s surreal.”

Building Buzz The Great Divide formed in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1992, featuring McClure as the gravelly voiced frontman and lead guitarist, Scotte Lester on rhythm guitar and vocals, JJ Lester behind the kit, and Kelley Green on bass. McClure grew up on the outskirts of Tecumseh, a small town southeast of Oklahoma City. The Lester brothers were raised in rural Payne County, Oklahoma, outside of Stillwater.

Green was a rodeo cowboy from Northwest Arkansas.

McClure and Green both moved to Stillwater to attend Oklahoma State University. McClure met JJ

through work in town. Green and Scotte, meanwhile, played in a band with local drummer Noe Flores and his brother, Bobby. When that group broke up, Both Lesters and Green invited McClure to audition for their band, but McClure — influenced heavily by ’80s metal while the rest of the band was drawn toward country — did not immediately fit in. “You’re too loud,” Scotte told McClure after the audition.

Eventually, though, McClure sought to record demos of songs he had written, and JJ convinced the others to join. They enjoyed the process, and when they got an offer to play after a bull-riding event in a

neighboring town for an $88 payday, they took it. The thrill of a live show stuck around, and they began booking bar and dancehall gigs.

Through word of mouth (Green recalls printing hundreds of flyers for Great Divide shows and placing them on car windshields in college towns across the Midwest), the band caught on. A cult following grew in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, as well as Amarillo, Fort Worth, and Austin, Texas.

“I don’t know what I thought,” McClure says. “I was just excited that we were doing it ourselves.”

In the mid-1990s, The Great Divide did not have fiddles or steel guitars, but they still had a country

MCKENZIE WHITMAN

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Wyatt Flores

bent to their sound. It was easy to compare McClure’s singing to Steve Earle’s, especially when he was backed only by guitars and percussion. And playing lead guitar, he never shied away from adding twang to his guitar solos. In an era in which radio-friendly country music was moving away from fiddle and steel, The Divide turned heads on Music Row. Independently, the band had sold 25,000 copies of their 1995 debut album, Goin’ For Broke, which was impressive, even for bands who had record deals. Shortly after recording their follow-up album, 1998’s Break in the Storm, they landed a deal with Atlantic Records.

Atlantic, according to the band, wanted to take the fan base they had built and scale it nationwide.

“Getting the deal was exciting,” McClure says, “but the path up to it was the coolest part, because we were doing it on our own.”

Break in the Storm produced a Top 40 song in “Pour Me a Vacation,” and the band’s follow-up the next year, Revolutions, turned out “College Days,” which quickly became an anthem for students and alumni at universities across Oklahoma and Texas. However, neither was enough of a hit to bump the band into the A-list of the day’s country stars, and after a leadership change at Atlantic, the band asked

for — and received — a release from the label.

Rise and Fall The Atlantic deal and radio attention grew the band’s fanbase, and by the turn of the millennium, The Great Divide was drawing crowds in Texas and Oklahoma that rivaled those of other roots icons in the region like Robert Earl Keen and Charlie Robison. They also embraced a role of torchbearers for the Red Dirt music scene. What started as a quasi-collective of songwriters centered around Stillwater in the writing spirit of Woody Guthrie had turned into a

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The Great Divide’s Grand Ole Opry debut, July 10, 2024

wanted to record rock songs, which the rest of the band opposed, and he contentiously put out a solo album, 12 Pieces, right as the band released 2002’s Remain. It became their last album together for 20 years.

“As I kept drinking through my youth, I never really matured emotionally,” McClure says. “So I couldn’t have hard conversations. I would wait until things built up, until I exploded, instead of talking them out, and that would reveal all this stuff nobody even knew about under the surface that I was too scared to talk about.”

After McClure left the band, the remaining three members found a new frontman in Micah Ray Aills, who had a far more traditional

country sound. They cut an album together, 2005’s Under Your Own Sun, but eventually the original members found themselves too jaded to continue. “I was done with music,” JJ recalls.

The Great Divide’s breakup lasted until 2012, when a remorseful McClure, not yet sober, brokered a reunion concert in Stillwater. It was a hit. Things started coming full circle.

Mentors to a Rising Star Noe Flores did not pursue music past his college days playing with Green and Scotte Lester. But, he still lived near Stillwater and kept in touch with his old bandmates. In

TOM HARRIS

rowdy college scene by 2000, and The Great Divide was its top draw.

In the scene, The Great Divide influenced Cross Canadian Ragweed, who influenced Jason Boland and The Stragglers and Stoney LaRue — all based in Stillwater circa 2000. When Ragweed got a record deal of their own, McClure became their producer. Eventually, he produced the biggest Red Dirt album ever recorded, Turnpike Troubadours’ Diamonds and Gasoline. (McClure also co-produced Road of Life, the first album for Whiskey Myers.)

But in 2003, The Great Divide crumbled. Addictions and musical differences pulled the band apart, and egos kept it apart. McClure also

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2001, Noe and his wife, Shannon, welcomed a son, Wyatt, who grew up surrounded by music. When it became apparent that Wyatt had musical talent of his own, he found role models in Green and Scotte.

“If it wasn’t for Scotte and Kelley sitting down and giving me the confidence, or pushing me to try, or me sitting around campfires watching them play, I’d have never turned into all this,” Wyatt says.

“Watching them on stage, all my life as a kid, it only sparked the dream for me.”

Wyatt started playing professionally as a teenager. After graduating high school, he gave college a try, but only lasted two weeks before leaving and moving to

Nashville to pursue music full-time.

The pandemic delayed any immediate breakout, but in 2022, he wrote “Please Don’t Go,” an acoustic plea for another person not to take their life that went viral on TikTok in early 2023. He landed a record deal with Island Records last year and was named to the Opry NextStage class of 2024.

Meanwhile, McClure decided to clean up his life. He reconnected with an old friend, Chrislyn Lawrence, in 2018, and they became partners, co-writers, and eventually spouses. McClure sobered up for Lawrence, swearing off alcohol and pills. Earlier this year, the duo released a self-titled album as Crow and Gazelle centered on healing

and forgiveness.

McClure’s sobriety also brought peace to The Great Divide. They became a band again, adding in longtime fan Bryce Conway to play keyboard. In 2022, they recorded Providence, an album centered around second chances. Their fanbase, loyal for three decades, kept turning up at shows.

“The first time I heard them play with sober Mike, they just sounded so happy,” says Cody Canada, current frontman of The Departed and formerly a member of Cross Canadian Ragweed. “They played so happily. Mike is everything to me.

To see him find love again, and for him to find this second act, I’m gonna cry talking about it.”

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Last spring, Flores received his first official invite to play the Opry as a solo artist, and he was invited back in July. The 23-year-old rising star also booked his first headlining show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for this December and was adamant that his mentors come along for both gigs.

“I love getting to go to their shows,” Flores says. “But now we’re really getting to do the thing. It’s a full-circle moment for us all.”

‘For the Love of Each Other’ Playing the Opry is, in many ways, being a featured exhibit in a living museum. On a show day, backstage visitor tours run constantly, right up until the area needs to be cleared for the evening’s performances. In July, when one such tour came within earshot of The Great Divide

wrapping up their sound check, McClure shouted in their direction, “Now, if you look over to your left, you can see some D-list celebrities!”

The Opry’s dressing rooms and halls are filled with photos, mementos, and stories from the venue’s history. The green room closest to the stage is reserved for Vince Gill. When he’s playing — as he was on this night — he keeps the door open, allowing for passing glances as he rehearses or chats up his camp.

On this night, The Great Divide played it cool. Their road to the circle was paved by Flores, and it humbled them.

“Thirty years ago, we as The Great Divide thought we should have been doing this,” Scotte says.

“Thirty years later, I don’t think that any of us think we deserve it.”

At the Grand Ole Opry, though,

first-timers get a red-carpet treatment deserving of the honor.

The nearest parking spot to the Opry artist’s entrance was reserved for the band, with a sign commemorating their debut. They were given a green room named “In the Circle.”

Prior to their set, host Kelly Sutton congratulated the band on their comeback. Before being pointed to the stage, JJ pulled the band into a huddle: “We deserve to be here, and we know it,” he said, contradicting Scotte’s earlier assessment. “For the love of each other, and for the love of the fans, let’s go kick ass.”

The three-song set flew by: They opened with “Never Could,” their debut single for Atlantic, and followed it with “Good Side,” the 2023 Texas Country Music Association’s single of the year.

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“If it wasn’t for Scotte and Kelley sitting down and giving me the confidence, or pushing me to try, or me sitting around campfires watching them play, I’d have never turned into all this.

Watching them on stage, all my life as a kid, it only sparked the dream for me.”

Wyatt Flores

“It’s an honor for all of us to come full circle in our lives, and to stand on this circle right here,” McClure said from the stage, before the band launched into their final song, “Mr. Devil,” an original gospel tune from their 1999 album Revolutions. Before the final chorus, McClure yielded lead vocals to Scotte, who sang two verses of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as the Opry audience clapped along.

Afterward, Scotte explained that his daughter had pointed out the significance of “Will the Circle” — the last song performed on the original Opry stage in 1974 — and the band unanimously agreed it should be the show closer. They left to an ovation.

“This place has such a reverence to it,” Scotte says. “That’s what kept going through my mind. Everybody just seems to have a reverence and

appreciation for what that building, and that show, means.”

Their walk back to the “In the Circle” room took them past Flores’ green room. Although the younger Flores still had half an hour before his set, he gathered his band, friends, and family for a toast.

Flores’ fiddle player, Kenzie Sue Miracle, passed around prosecco from Josh Cellars in plastic cups as the Lester brothers and Green stepped in. After thanking his band and crew, Flores turned to The Great Divide.

“I want to thank The Great Divide for being here,” he began, “and for being huge influences on my entire life. I don’t believe that I would ever be in music if it wasn’t for y’all. To the circle!”

With plastic cups in the air, everyone in the room called back, “To the circle!” ■

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MATRIARCH

With Linda Thompson unable to sing, friends and family lend their voices to her songs

PHOTOS BY TOM OLDHAM

by John Lingan

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“There was never a false note when she sang, no melisma, no affect at all. The emotion in every line is given its due.”

Tammy Faye Starlite

T

he last day of June, Teddy

Thompson arrived to City Winery New York City early in the afternoon for a long, busy soundcheck. He was hosting a multi-artist tribute show that night, the kind that Manhattan’s downtown scene has specialized in for decades, and this event featured many of his old friends who had also emerged from that fertile world, including Syd Straw, Martha Wainwright, Amy Helm, Jenni Muldaur, and Tammy Faye Starlite. It was a familiar kind of evening in many ways, except that the focus of their veneration was a special one for Thompson — his mother.

I Want to See the Bright Lights

Tonight, Linda Thompson’s 1974 debut as part of a duo with her husband (and Teddy’s father) Richard, formerly of Fairport Convention, introduced the couple’s bracingly sincere and traditionally minded vision of British folk-rock.

They explored this across six records together before divorcing in 1983. Linda’s voice on these records sounds somehow strong and fragile simultaneously, like a spiderweb shaking tautly in heavy wind. She is brilliant on bawdier songs like “Hokey Pokey,” but as an act, Richard and Linda Thompson were better known for some of the most tear-inducing songs ever recorded — poignant glories like “Down Where the Drunkards Roll,” “A Heart

Needs a Home,” and “Dimming of the Day.” Nearly 50 years to the day since her public career began on Bright Lights, rare news came of a forthcoming Linda Thompson album, this one featuring the punning title Proxy Music and a cover with her, now 75, dolled up and supine to resemble the garishly posed model on Roxy Music’s 1972 self-titled debut. Literally and figuratively, this was a new side to a woman who has personified upright folk-music dignity for a half-century.

And the reintroduction has come at the unlikeliest time: After a decades-long struggle with the vocal condition spasmodic dysphonia,

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ETHAN COVEY

Teddy Thompson

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Thompson can no longer sing. The title of her record, which was released a couple weeks before the City Winery show, refers to its unlikely conception: Thompson wrote the songs and Teddy pulled in a cast of acolytes to sing, some of whom were among the lineup at City Winery. Fate prevented Thompson from presenting her own music to the world, so now the world would hear artists who love her bring it to life themselves.

“I probably met Linda as a baby, but through Teddy was how I got to meet her,” says Rufus Wainwright, Martha’s brother, whose parents Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III knew the Thompsons from overlapping musical travels in the 1970s. “She doesn’t play the victim card at all,” he continues via Zoom, “and she overcomes whatever adversity she is faced with.”

Rufus sings Proxy Music’s flirtatious “Darling, This Will Never Do,” though he couldn’t make it to New York. Tammy Faye Starlite, a performance artist and singer who specializes in satirical country music, handled the song capably that night. Previously, Starlite held a show about President Trump and was shocked to discover that Linda Thompson came and loved it.

“When I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I listened to Richard and Linda constantly,” Starlite said backstage during soundcheck, as the other vocalists came and went discussing the show order. She singled out “Has He Got a Friend for Me,” one of those classic plaintive weepers from Bright Lights, as a favorite. “There was never a false note when she sang, no melisma, no affect at all. The emotion in every line is given its due.”

Truth and Kindness That evening at City Winery, multiple people mentioned Thompson’s precision focus and lauded the gift of her voice. “She sounds like nobody else,” Martha Wainwright said, “There’s a cutting truthfulness in every line.”

Martha appears on Proxy Music singing “Or Nothing at All,” a heartsick, wordy piano ballad that she performed in New York. The intergenerational collaborations between the Thompsons and Wainwright-McGarrigles are their own subgenre at this point. The couples knew each other in the folky days; Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright toured together in the 1980s, while Linda and Kate remained close. Then in the ’90s, Rufus and Teddy became friends in Los Angeles as their own careers took off.

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Spasmodic dysphonia was an issue for Linda all the way back to her days singing with Richard. The condition is neurological, and causes clenching spasms in the vocal cords, making speech impossible. It lasts a lifetime, only worsens after onset, and the sole available treatment is regular Botox injections in the vocal cords — a painful procedure that only helps temporarily. The cause remains unknown.

After her duo career ended, Thompson released one solo album in 1985, then fell silent for years, at least publicly. Privately, she was a one-woman cheering section for all the younger talent that her son and daughter Kami, herself a

professional singer who appears on Proxy Music, came to know in their own blossoming careers.

“She just makes you feel like the most important person in the world,” Jenni Muldaur, who released an album of country duets with Teddy in 2023.

That kindness manifests in all parts of Thompson’s life, not just in music. “She is effusive in her kindness,” says Martha Wainwright. “… She was never interested in telling me how to sing, she was super supportive of our careers. I sang as a guest with her. She was so maternal.”

That word is hardly metaphorical. In 2010, Kate McGarrigle was dying of clear cell

sarcoma while Martha’s son was ill.

They went to London, where Thompson and her longtime husband, talent agent Steve Kenis, “went into parental mode,” according to Rufus. They looked after Kate so she could be strong enough to help her daughter. “My mother was so scared,” he says.

“Linda took care of her. We gave our mother a great passing.”

Martha puts it succinctly: “Linda was the glue for me while my mom died.”

The wonderfully full-voiced alto Syd Straw, who has recorded as a backing vocalist and solo singersongwriter since the 1980s, only met Thompson relatively recently, despite memorizing her early

GAELLE LEROYER

Martha Wainright

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records and knowing Teddy, Richard, and others for ages. “I’ve known her for eight years, but I’ve loved her my whole life,” she says.

“She’s the matriarch of this musical universe, these incestuous musical families.”

A Grand Entrance By dinnertime on the night of the City Winery gig, the singers were applying makeup in the dressing room mirrors and changing into their stage clothes. Teddy bounced between guests, pulling people into the hallway to practice last-minute harmonies when they weren’t using the communal iron for their outfits.

Linda missed soundcheck; she

didn’t need to participate, after all.

And as everyone prepared for the event and for her imminent arrival, it was still unclear if she would even be able to speak. It was some surprise, then, when she first announced herself with loud conversation.

An English voice drifted in from the hallway, then Linda Thompson walked in on Muldaur’s arm. She was still instantly recognizable from those classic album covers, and she was positively glowing from the love being shown her.

John Cowsill, from yet another musical family, had just met Linda minutes earlier. “She hugged me like I knew her my whole life,” he marveled.

Linda and I walked to the hallway and I got a sense of the openheartedness, the perpetual readiness to meet the next friend, that has been elemental to her career from the start. She said she got her Botox injection the day before so she could at least speak with everyone at the show. But singing was still inconceivable.

John Grant, the lone male singer besides Teddy that evening, walked by. A big, bearded American baritone, he sings his own tribute, titled “John Grant,” on Proxy Music, and would do so at the show as well.

“I like younger gay artists,” she said about Grant and with a nod to Rufus Wainwright as well. “My first boyfriend was gay. He was the best

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boyfriend I ever had.” Grant, who is scarcely half Linda’s age, says they go out for pedicures together when they’re in the same city.

Thompson recalled the incredible sexism in the ’70s folk scene, despite its supposedly rarified ideals. Gay men were often a respite from that macho atmosphere. When Richard Thompson became interested in Sufism in the mid-1970s, Linda joined him on the spiritual journey, which went so far that they converted and forswore their public music careers to live in a traditional religious community for two years.

Richard remains in the faith, though Linda left long ago, saying that she encountered an incredible amount of homophobia in that community, too.

“I love women,” she added, as if it needed saying. “I prefer their company.” Before she ever met Richard, one of her first friends in the 1960s London folk scene was Sandy Denny, the eventual Fairport Convention singer with a gorgeous, husky voice. Like Nick Drake, another of Linda’s friends, Denny was an uncommon talent who struggled with depression and addiction; after years of erratic behavior, she died in 1978 at age 31 after falling down a flight of stairs. To this day, Linda says she considers Denny her main musical influence, alongside Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

The Thompsons’ divorce effectively played out in real time over the course of the tour for their swansong LP, Shoot Out the Lights, the very title of which gestured at

the violent feelings at play. One night in 1983, Linda found herself drunk outside the Roxy in Los Angeles with newborn Kami, after Richard had dumped her for another woman. She called Linda Ronstadt, who was a member of the international sorority of gifted folk singers. The queen of Los Angeles country-rock picked up Linda and Kami and hosted them for a week.

Linda Thompson made her reputation singing songs about people at their breaking point. But she also made her family by singing those songs, and the lesson of her life is that songs enrich relationships and vice versa.

Bright Lights The concert was a sellout or near to it,

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and Thompson sat with her husband among the fans, a few tables off to the side, stage left. No announcement was made of her presence, but the singers tended to naturally direct their words to her when they weren’t duetting with Teddy. One by one, they left the stage and nearly crumpled from suppressed nerves. “I can’t believe I just sang that in front of her,” said Straw as the applause for her stunning rendition of “Dimming of the Day” still echoed in the back of house.

The evening climaxed with Martha Wainwright singing “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,” a proudly working-class, waiting-forthe-weekend anthem. Her voice is phenomenally expressive; it swoops up and down and moves from a tissue-thin whisper to a feral growl.

She is fascinatingly intense, a prowling entertainer onstage. That makes her dramatically unlike Linda, who told The Believer in 2008, “I have the stage presence of a totem pole.”

But of all the incredible moments that night, the most stunning came soon after “Bright Lights.” The evening’s participants all came on stage to perform the final track on Proxy Music, “Those Damn Roches,” a tongue-in-cheek waltz about the many musical families in Thompson’s life, including her own. The final display of love and reverence was enough to make anyone cast aside doctor’s orders. Within a minute, Thompson stepped onstage, bringing Terre Roche, one of the song’s title subjects, with her from the crowd.

Around three microphones, the

night’s makeshift family sang Thompson’s apt chorus: Bound together in blood and song Who can break us?

When we are singing loud and strong Who can take us?

For just a few minutes, Thompson stood in front of a microphone in New York City, her eyes closed and her face pointed to the ceiling while she sang. She swayed with her old friends and her newer ones, her son leading the way.

We were told that we wouldn’t hear Thompson’s voice that night, and technically we didn’t, but only because it melded with nearly a dozen others that owe her the world. ■

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CAT

POWER Fantastic Cat’s collectivism makes the roots-rock supergroup shine

PHOTOS BY VIVIAN WANG

by Jeff Gage

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Fantastic Cat at Brooklyn Made on June 7, 2024

S

ometimes a joke can go

too far. Don’t tell that to the members of Fantastic Cat, though. Over the course of the past three years, the New York quartet of Anthony D’Amato, Don DiLego, Brian Dunne, and Mike Montali have carved out an unlikely following of songwriting buffs and cat lovers with a cheeky mix of one-liners, killer pop hooks, and, yes, matching suits and cat masks.

There’s not another rock and roll band like them around. It’s not by accident, either.

“We’re sort of reverse engineering the whole band idea.

This is not the typical way that one forms a band,” says DiLego, who, together with Montali, came up with the idea of bringing together four established songwriters after the two toured together in 2019. The plan was to form a side project. But on that front, at least, the joke may

be on them.

“The unique position we were in was, hey, yeah, we’re forming a ‘supergroup,’ but we’re not actually that super,” DiLego adds with a laugh. “And [now] the band is actually becoming more of a thing, collectively, than our individual projects are.”

It’s a punchline they all are happy to live with. On their second album together, Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat, released in June, the frisky, freewheeling foursome become more than a ragtag collection of songwriters. They’re a ragtag band, which is just the way they like it — swapping instruments, trading harmonies, and poking fun at rock cliches every chance they get.

It’s a formula begging to be called “dad joke rock,” if only the songs weren’t so smart and tightly written.

“We take the music very seriously. Everything else is a party or a joke,” Dunne says. “And you’re

like, why didn’t I think of that earlier? That’s how it was supposed to be. That’s what we dreamed of when we were kids: Have fun, but take the songs as life or death.”

Playful Spirit The playful spirit is infectious, and that goes for more than just the music. Fantastic Cat’s social media presence leans into the band’s absurdist humor, like Photoshopping themselves into New York magazine listicles or creating fake articles advertising “Five Songs You Didn’t Know Fantastic Cat Wrote.” (“Piano Man” shows up twice.) To celebrate the release of the new album, they even held a virtual pet adoption event to find home for real-life New York City cats.

“I mean, the name is already ridiculous,” D’Amato observes. “The visuals are ridiculous. There’s

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nothing too stupid for us to try.”

Being “stupid” may not have been the idea going in, but it’s not such a stretch, either. When Montali and DiLego, who previously produced some of Montali’s albums with his band Hollis Brown, started brainstorming, they initially discussed it as a duets project, but quickly considered how it might look to bring in a handful of singers, each with distinct styles. That’s when D’Amato and Dunne came in.

“We were like, ‘What if we just made a record and didn’t have to worry about releasing it, or hiring promotion, or finding a label, or doing shows?’” DiLego recalls. “Like, remove every layer of stress to just simply make a record for fun?”

The final component they needed — the band’s name — came through a chance encounter. Or, dare one say it, fate. While out for drinks in the East Village in Manhattan, the four bandmates

asked their server what she would recommend for a band name and agreed to go with whatever she said.

Her response, without hesitation, was, “Fantastic Cat.” It was the perfect mix of “the whimsical and the surreal,” according to D’Amato, whose wife Jane Beaird, a visual artist and graphic designer, quickly set about designing their cat masks.

For D’Amato and Dunne, in particular, both of whom came to the group as solo singersongwriters, the Fantastic Cat identity became a source of inspiration in and of itself. They embraced the silliness as an opportunity to express a side of themselves they wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable doing on their own.

“It was almost like this escape from how serious you have to be as a solo singer-songwriter,” D’Amato admits. “Maybe it just feels that way, but when you’re performing under your own name, some of the ideas

you might have, you’re like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to do this?’ But you’re like, ‘I don’t want to attach my name to that.’” Offstage, the wisecracks no doubt suit their true selves. “Maybe putting on the cat mask gave me the freedom to be more myself,” D’Amato surmises.

More Than a Scene Band With the band’s Fantastic Cat EP, released in conjunction with their first-ever live show in 2021, and their 2022 debut LP ironically titled The Very Best of Fantastic Cat, the band remained essentially a group of four individual songwriters. Each brought songs that hadn’t fit in with their existing projects and the members worked out the arrangements together. Dunne says there was even the possibility that they’d have a rotating cast of members. “I think that originally we thought this was going to be more of a New York scene,

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kind of just a hangout that we do in a night,” he says.

Those ambitions rapidly changed in the aftermath of the The Very Best of Fantastic Cat release party in July 2022. Once again, there was a bit of reverse engineering at play. Rather than take the conventional approach of booking a venue to suit their budding fanbase, they opted for the 600-cap Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, even though they’d never played to more than a few dozen people before. The room wound up being packed.

“We definitely took a leap of faith on that show,” DiLego says. “We sweated it out for months and months and months.” Until the moment the curtain opened during the first song, the band had no idea

how many people were there. “I looked at my bandmates and saw the smiles on the faces [in the crowd]. It was like, ‘Wow, we just kind of invented something here,’” DiLego says.

Shortly thereafter, Fantastic Cat made their network television debut on CBS Saturday Morning (they returned to perform again this June), and they were off and running. They booked a run of outof-state gigs and were floored by how many people showed up. They were more than a scene band, after all.

“Looking back, it might be less surprising, but in the moment you’re kind of like, ‘How did these people ever even hear about this thing in Denver?,’ ” Montali says.

“Why are you here? What’s going on?”

By the time the band reconvened to record Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat, with sessions split between DiLego’s home in the Poconos and various studios around Brooklyn, they’d cohered into a true group dynamic. Each song was a collaboration from top to bottom, and their signature sound — a function of each member alternating between playing guitar, bass, and drums — had been refined into a loose, swinging groove.

“One of the things I’m proudest of with this record, and many people at shows have told me this, is that they’re mixed up about who did what,” Dunne says. “And that was the goal.”

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“It was almost like this escape from how serious you have to be as a solo singer-songwriter. ... Maybe putting on the cat mask gave me the freedom to be more myself.”

Anthony D’Amato

Everyone, in way or another, is a consummate utility player, and it shows. From the spring-loaded riffing of opener “Oh Man!” to the meaty harmonies of “Later On” and the woozy music hall sing-along of “So Glad You Made It,” there’s a ramshackle charm to each track that makes them feel at once spontaneous and carefully sculpted.

The album’s 12 tracks were whittled down from between 30 and 40 songs. “Oh Man!” was a perfect example of the four members playing off one another: DiLego brought in the chorus, D’Amato wrote the verses, Dunne added a bridge, and Montali worked up the arrangement.

As the resident band veteran, Montali admires the various

strengths each player brings to the table. “Don is a very good engineer and producer and mixer,” he says, while Dunne is a bit of a “wizard” and all-purpose fixer. “He has the ability to put in the missing pieces like no one I’ve ever met,” Montali marvels. D’Amato, meanwhile, brings a painstaking attention to detail with the lyrics. “He won’t settle for mediocre lyrics,” Montali reckons, “which pushes the rest of us to bring a good voice to each song.”

And Montali? “He brings drinks to the table,” Dunne deadpans.

Humor, in fact, is a crucial part of the songs as well, complementing the heaviest of subject matter or ringing it with a delightful edge of irony. Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat’s comedy reinforces

the storytelling without undercutting the emotional impact of the songs. If anything, it accentuates it. No matter how naturally the jokes come, it’s not something to force.

“I think you fail a lot,” D’Amato says about writing humor. “You can tell in your gut before you ever even show it to anybody if you struck that balance. But if you’re unsure, being in a band of songwriters, there’s no shortage of opinions. And no one is shy about sharing their opinion.”

What really makes it all work is that everyone in the band so clearly enjoys themselves. “From the jump, there’s been an understanding that if we’re having fun, people are going to be there, and they’re going to be having fun too,” Dunne says. ■

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REVIEWS

These are excerpts of reviews and stories originally published at nodepression.com, and you can read many more reviews — plus news stories, interviews, and columns — there. For more of what’s on our radar, follow No Depression’s “Best of the Month” playlist on Spotify.

Kaia Kater Strange Medicine Free Dirt Records Kaia Kater’s Strange Medicine is a rumination on the numerous mistakes and traumas passed down across generations. How is one to make medicine of centuries of “colonialism, sexism, racism, and misogyny,” she asks. Though Strange Medicine doesn’t offer solutions, like Kater’s previous work, it holds and jostles and compels the listener a little bit closer to some semblance of revelation.

After years of arduous touring, Kater enrolled in a film composition course to recalibrate and use her musical gifts to help other artists’ works come to fruition. Suddenly, having so little control over an artistic statement was liberating, if

Tim Easton Find Your Way Black Mesa Records “Think of everyone you hurt, starting with yourself,” sings Tim Easton on his latest album, Find Your Way, his voice expertly seasoned by the nearly three decades of his journeyman career. He repeats the refrain like a call and response: “Everyone you lied to, starting with yourself / Every broken promise, starting with yourself / Every broken heart, starting with yourself.” The song is “Everything You’re Afraid Of,” and it feels like the culmination of a lifetime of learning from your mistakes until you finally reach some kind of revelatory selfacceptance. Even the song’s steady, unflinching pace suggests there is no more time to waste. Let it go and do it soon. Easton certainly has, and Find Your Way is proof

creatively challenging in a way she wasn’t sure she wanted to engage in forever. She spent a year with the program before returning to her own songs. But the experience of studying composition gave her a taste of being amid such fully imagined arrangements.

When she started writing her own songs again, Kater knew she wanted to stretch beyond the occasionally confining expectations of Americana. As a result, Strange Medicine welcomes listeners into a world where heartbreak, rumination, and a quest for catharsis are gates through which one passes into history. Kater takes her audience from the Salem witch trials to an 18th-century Haitian uprising to Canada’s most populous city in the present day. The journey is occasionally arduous, but there is always room for hope and wonder and poetry. — Kim Ruehl

positive.

Find Your Way is enlightened, but it doesn’t bludgeon you over the head about it. Instead, it offers a bit of grace for those, like Easton himself, maybe clumsily feeling around in the dark for the door out into the light. These songs are about finding connection over isolation, reaching out when you need it, and being there, not only for the ones you love, but also for yourself in the mess of growth.

As has always been his knack, Easton doesn’t skimp on the details that turn his songs into rich short stories. The lived-in worlds he builds for “Dishwasher’s Blues” and “Little Brother” will let you in with open arms, to walk along the shores of Southern California or join two brothers on the run.

Easton is ever searching for the character, the scene, the lesson, all along still writing some of his best songs.

— Maeri Ferguson

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Boy Golden For Eden Six Shooter Records Boy Golden makes weightless music in heavy times. “Untitled,” the closing track of his new album, For Eden, documents the weightlessness of youth: of drinking in the same three bars, serving drinks for a living, playing local shows, looking forward into the great expanse of future.

Boy Golden — aka Canadian songwriter Liam Duncan — alternates between poppy melodies and chipper chatter in this song.

Still, “Untitled” seems to acknowledge that the future awaiting the young is one of spinning wheels, of dreams that can no longer really come true.

For Eden is an autobiographical slice of the independent musician life, told from the perspective of one who finds the bright side without ignoring its shadow. The album bounces along, its 10 tracks rich with

AJ Lee and Blue Summit City of Glass Signature Sounds In 2011, Mother Jones published a profile of a 13-year-old AJ Lee under the headline “Could This Kid Be the Next Alison Krauss?”.

That’s a hell of an expectation to put on a kid, but there are some ways in which the comparison was apt. Like Krauss, Lee took her first steps into music at a young age, with an inaugural performance at age 4 at an open-mic night at a local pizzeria. Also like Krauss, Lee possessed a voice that seemed far bigger than her small frame, and far wiser than her few years. And the fertile ground in which both talents took root, albeit on opposite sides of the country, was bluegrass festivals.

Lee formed Blue Summit in 2015, with Sullivan Tuttle on guitar among its members, and the group toured widely as they found their sound for a new phase of life.

banjo, acoustic guitar, hand claps, drum machines, and effected vocals. Duncan sees that the deck is stacked against the young, yet these songs are about keeping relaxed and positive anyway. Some lines — “Music before language / love before profits / I’ll take my wide-eyed optimism / in the face of all of it” — could double as mantras.

Duncan’s 1995 Toyota van — which gets its own song — appears regularly throughout For Eden, and even on its cover art. The shambling, stripped psychedelic folk of this record is like the interior of a tour van that’s almost 30 — comfortable, broken-in, and cobbled together from a mix of new and vintage parts.

“I remember getting way too high / on the streets of Amsterdam / looking for the answers, and / maybe we were finding them,” Duncan sings lightly on “The Way.” “That’s just the way I am / but maybe I’ll change / everything else does / so why not me?” Perhaps that ability to let go of preconceptions — even about oneself — is key to Boy Golden’s optimism. — Corbie Hill

The band’s first album, 2019’s Like I Used To, showed off their bluegrass bona fides with a youthful twist, and 2021’s I’ll Come Back pulled in sounds beyond that genre. City of Glass finds the band, now with Jan Purat on fiddle and Scott Gates on guitar and vocals, taking in their surroundings — what they see around them but also what they see within themselves.

On City of Glass’ title track, a glistening city is viewed in terms of its component parts, namely the grains of sand that make up the glass in all those tall buildings. It’s a magic trick that makes something solid feel suddenly temporary, a reminder that nothing is forever, so it’s best to focus on what truly lasts. “Hillside” likewise takes the long view, likening a hill’s eons-long journey of breaking down and building up to a woman’s deeply ingrained and enduring power. City of Glass ends with “All I Know,” a return to the appreciation of small things and holding on to what’s good while it lasts. — Stacy Chandler

Fall 2024 Contributors BEN ARTHUR is a writer from Jacksonville, Florida. He is an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University, studying political science and English. His bylines can be found in the Nashville Scene, Aquarium Drunkard, and No Bells.

BJ BARHAM is the singer, songwriter, and band leader of American Aquarium. The band released its 10th album, The Fear of Standing Still, in July. Born and raised in North Carolina, Barham currently lives in Wendell, North Carolina with his wife and daughter. When he’s not busy with American Aquarium, he’s probably eating tomato sandwiches with Duke’s mayo, rooting for NC State, or visiting national parks with his family.

BRIAN ELMORE is an emergency medicine physician in El Paso, Texas. He co-founded and serves as the medical director for Clinica Hope, a free clinic for migrants, with the Hope Border Institute in Ciudad Juarez. His writing on treating migrant patients can be found in the Atlantic, Border Chronicle, Texas Observer, and CNN. More information on Clinica Hope can be found at hopeborder.org.

HILARY SAUNDERS is the managing editor at No Depression and her previous work has appeared in Paste, ESPN, Next City, The Jewish Daily Forward, and more. She is a proud member of the Recording Academy, National Press Club, and Society of Professional Journalists, an alumna of the University of Miami, and a unironic believer that rock and roll can save the world.

JASON ADAM KATZENSTEIN is a cartoonist and comedy writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and MAD Magazine. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Everything Is an Emergency.

JEFF GAGE is a freelance music writer in Brooklyn. His writing appears in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

JIM SHAHEN is a freelance writer from around Albany, New York. He’s the popular music writer for the Albany Times Union and has written for No Depression; Living Blues; Consequence of Sound; Vinyl Me, Please; and Bandbox.

He’ll never stop telling people about the time he was buttdialed by George Clinton.

JOHN LINGAN is the author of A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk. He lives in Maryland. Find him online at johnlingan.com.

JOSH CRUTCHMER is a journalist and author based in New York. He is the planning editor for The New York

Times and a contributor to Rolling Stone. A native of Oklahoma’s Red Dirt music scene, Josh has written two books about folk rock — Red Dirt (2020) and The Motel Cowboy Show (2023) — with a third, Red Dirt Unplugged, set for release on Dec. 13 via Back Lounge Publishing.

MARCUS AMAKER takes daily naps and is Charleston, South Carolina’s first poet laureate. He’s also an opera librettist, an electronic musician, an award-winning graphic designer, and a member of the South Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He’s an Academy of American Poets fellow, and his poetry has been recognized by NPR, The Washington Post, The Kennedy Center, and more. His 10th book is Hold What Makes You Whole. His original opera with Gillian Rae Perry, The Weight of Light, premiered at the Chicago Opera Theater in April.

MEREDITH LAWRENCE writes and photographs interview-driven stories about music, art, and culture. Her work has appeared in GRAMMY.com, Vox, American Theater Magazine, Saddle Mountain Post, Alta Journal, and more, and she holds an M.A. in arts and culture writing from Columbia Journalism School. She grew up in Oregon and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

RYAN DOBROWSKI is a painter and musician from Oregon now living in Tucson, Arizona. When not touring with his band, Blind Pilot, he spends many of his days painting in his studio in the Southwest. Blind Pilot’s new album, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain, is out now via ATO Records and you can find more of his work on his Instagram, @Ryan-Dobrowski.

SEAN MOORES is a managing editor at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in Washington, DC. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter, a large handful of underplayed guitars, and an increasingly unruly collection of vinyl records.

STACY CHANDLER is the assistant editor for No Depression and winner of the 2022 Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. She previously has written and edited for the (Raleigh, North Carolina) News & Observer, alumni magazines, accounting magazines, online college courses, and pretty much anything else that has words in it. She lives in Raleigh with her husband, their daughter, and a very pampered dog.

ZACH SCHONFELD is a freelance writer, journalist, and critic based in New York. He writes about culture for Pitchfork, Vulture, SPIN, and many other publications. He was formerly a senior writer for Newsweek, where he was on staff for five years. He is the author of How Coppola Became Cage, a book about Nicolas Cage’s early career and rise to fame.

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ALYSSE GAFKJEN

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

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Included in this issue: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, a contemporary analysis of the old-time standard “In The Pines,” the first compilation of Ukrainian music, and more.

Between issues, stay current on roots music with news, reviews, and thought at nodepression.com. Here are just a few of the artists we’ve covered recently: Mavis Staples Billy Strings Kinky Friedman Kaitlin Butts Ruthie Foster

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Jewel Shelby Lynne Jamestown Revival Joni Mitchell Sturgill Simpson

I

Screen Door SLOWING DOWN AND ENJOYING THE VIEW

BY BJ BARHAM

’ve been a professional musician now for 18 years.

After 17 records and more than 3,500 shows, I’m proud to say that I have somehow managed to carve out my own little slice of success in the current hellscape that is the music business. I am well aware I won’t be winning any singing competitions anytime soon. I’ll never be the best musician in the room. I never had the jawline for Top 40 country radio. The one thing that I bring to the table, my secret weapon, is the fact that I’ve always been willing to outwork everyone in the room. It was the one variable that I was in control of, and I set out to build my entire career on it.

I knew that if my band, American Aquarium, was going to make it, we had to go out on the road and take it ourselves. We built this whole thing on three very simple principles: Never turn down a show, write the best songs we could, and go above and beyond to be good to the people that supported our music. My 20s were a never-ending tour of dive bars, punk rock clubs, and any “menu venue” that had a stage between North Carolina and California. In the beginning, growth was slow, but it was growth. Each year was more fruitful than the previous, so we pushed harder. More shows. Less downtime between records. By 2012, we were playing more than 300 shows a year, putting out a new record every 9-12 months and wearing the “road dog” title like a badge of honor. I felt like it would all fall apart if we even thought about taking our foot off the gas, so it was hammer down, 24/7.

That all changed when I became a father. The infant years were spent

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

cutting back from the relentless tour schedule we had built our reputation on.

Three hundred shows turned into 250 … turned into 200 … turned into 150. Balance became very important.

Time away, no matter the reason, was not worth the moments I was missing at home. It all came to a head the first time my girls dropped me off at the airport and my daughter said, “Please don’t go.” It broke me. I cried the whole first leg of my flight that day. It was then and there that I realized the only way I could remain in love with touring was for it to take a backseat to my family. I was now falling in love with being present and not missing the important things. The COVID years at home showed me all of the little moments I’d be missing if I kept running myself ragged on the road and it just wasn’t worth it.

I read that quote somewhere during the pandemic and it really resonated with me. I wrote it down in my notebook and walked away from it for a few years. When I was preparing the songs for this new record, The Fear of Standing Still, I kept coming back to that quote. It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to live in the moment and not think about the next one. The record is a reminder that your foot doesn’t always have to be on the gas pedal for you to still be moving forward. Moving slowly is better than not moving at all.

We live in such a comparative culture. No matter how big a victory you have today, you will log in to Instagram to see someone else having a bigger victory.

The music business is no different.

Wrote a new song? So did your favorite artist and it’s better. Book a new gig? Well, here’s four massive cool-kid festivals that announced their lineup today and you’re not on any of them.

We get so consumed with looking up the ladder of success, worrying about how we are going to take that next step forward. What we should be doing is looking back down the ladder and reminding ourselves how far we have already come. Every day is full of tiny victories, and I highly recommend slowing down long enough to let them soak in.

American Aquarium’s new album, The Fear of Standing Still, came out in July via Losing Side Records/Thirty Tigers.

JOSHUA BLACK WILKINS

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ISBN-13: 979-8-9860117-9-0 90000

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