MUSIC
Growing up, I never really appreciated the Blue Ridge Parkway. I mean, I drove on it and hiked alongside it. I knew it had beautiful views. But I somehow didn't grasp what it would be like to live without it.
It's like that with many things I suppose — family, health, home — you only notice how much they mean when they're gone.
With the Blue Ridge, that moment came when I moved away from Roanoke, Virginia for college and was suddenly living on flat land. I could no longer look in any direction and see undulating ridges. I could no longer drive fifteen minutes and stand atop a mountain with sweeping vistas.
I think back to when I was that homesick teen and know this song would have brought me to tears. Written and performed by Boone, North Carolina artist Shay Martin Lovette, it’s bound to tug heartstrings for fans of this iconic road.
To hear more of Shay's work, check out his stirring new album Scatter & Gather (Spotify|Apple), which was mostly written from a rural, creekside cabin.
Rarely is good relationship advice set to music, but Chattanooga-based The Foothills has pulled it off. Drawing from bluegrass and country traditions, this acoustic trio captures the sorrowful, low down feeling of eating crow.
"It is a song about confronting pride," said Paul Hadfield, the band's lead vocalist. "The protagonist of this story leads listeners through a series of scenes in their life culminating in the realization that their need to be right has only resulted in loss."
For anyone who has trouble saying "I'm sorry," that can be a true revelation. Funny enough, it also makes for a beautiful tune.
If you want to hear more from The Foothills, check out their album Shadow of the Mountain (Spotify), which contains this song, and their latest release Rest Easy (Spotify|Apple|Amazon).
If you told me a week ago that this classic, sing-along anthem from John Denver could ever be retooled into something creepy, I'd have said you're nuttier than a Payday bar. But that was before I heard this haunting rendition.
Indie country artist Brandi Carlile slowed the tune to a crawl and gave her voice a hint of echo for this new version, which was shot for an equally creepy television series. Images from CBS's "Clarice" are used in this video. (Yes, as in, "Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming.") While the TV tie-in makes it feel a bit commercial, I personally don't think it detracts from the song's power.
When guitarist Tony Rice died on Christmas Day in his North Carolina home, bluegrass music bade farewell to a second-generation star who expressed his music in modern terms and embraced bluegrass’s potential to both blend with and influence other genres.
“The music business has lost a true innovator,” says Jimmy Gaudreau, who played mandolin with Rice in the Eighties and Nineties. “As far as the guitar players of today, they name Tony Rice as the number one influence.”
Jake Blount is turning heads. With a carefully researched catalog of old time tunes written or popularized by Black and indigenous people, this Washington, D.C. native is bringing new attention to often overlooked mountain music.
Given that, it would have been easy for his debut album, "Spider Tales" (Apple | Amazon) to simply be a musical ethnography. That alone would have made it important. But the album is also good. With first rate playing, complex musical arrangements, and Blount's often mournful voice, the album shot to the number two spot on Billboard's bluegrass albums chart.
It includes the below tune, which Blount learned from an old recording of Manco Sneed, whose father was half-Cherokee. From the time he was a teen, Sneed's family lived in the Qualla Boundary, the tribal land of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This limited his exposure to other musicians, and some think that led to Sneed's intricate style of fiddling, which is echoed in Blount's beautiful rendition.
Here he plays with Tatiana Hargreaves, a young fiddler who, like Blount, represents a new generation of traditional musicians.
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