Nell Robinson and Jim Nunally House & Garden (Nell Robinson Music) Rating: 4 stars out of 5 The CD cover calls this album “Music at the intersection of bluegrass, country, folk and Americana,” and the description couldn’t possibly be more accurate. This San Francisco Bay Area-album by Southern transplant Nell Robinson and award-winning acoustic guitarist [...]

The most powerful songs are quite often the ones that are written from a writer’s own experience, and such is the case with “I Drink” by Mary Gauthier. From Gauthier’s 1999 album Drag Queens In Limousines, “I Drink” is the story of an alcoholic who seems resigned to, maybe even satisfied with, the life of [...]

This article appears in our upcoming May/June “country” issue. Subscribe here. READ OUR REVIEW OF THE GUITAR For more than a decade, Scott and Seth Avett have slowly built a career as The Avett Brothers – progressing from playing for anyone who would listen to them in their native North Carolina to recording best-selling albums, [...]

Writing a good love song, one that will bring tears to a woman’s eyes quicker than a dozen roses (or in the case of a man’s eyes, maybe quicker than tickets to a NASCAR race), is one of the hardest things any writer can do. Paul McCartney’s written a few that are part of pop [...]

  Doc Watson and Family Milestones: Legends of the Watson Family Clan (Open Records) 4.5 stars (out of 5) Coming on the heels of this year’s MerleFest music festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina is this four-CD set of (mostly) previously unavailable music of the bluegrass guitar legend Arthel “Doc” Watson and various family members, including [...]

Old dogs like me are often reluctant to try new things when it comes to our tried-and-true guitar tastes. Acoustic guitars today aren’t always made of the materials we grew up with, and we don’t have to put them in front of a mic today for people to hear them. So it can be hard [...]

Smaller-bodied acoustic guitars can sometimes be surprisingly loud, and that’s the case with Gibson’s new LG-2 American Eagle acoustic-electric. Gibson has revived a guitar that was first made in the early 1940s and was replaced in the early ’60s by the B-25, basically the same guitar with a few changes. One surmises that the American [...]

The Gibson J-35, so named for its $35 price tag, was originally introduced in the mid-1930s but was discontinued a few years later in favor of the J-45, which was only slightly different and carried the wartime “Only a Gibson Is Good Enough” slogan on the headstock. Now the J-35 is back, featuring that old [...]

Granger Smith Dirt Road Driveway (Pioneer Music) Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars Country music is full of guys who aren’t particularly gifted singers, e.g., Shelton or McGraw, but who worked with what they had to forge highly successful careers. Texan Granger Smith is another one who, in many ways, is just another country voice [...]

Everyone knows it’s finally spring in Nashville when thousands of aspiring songwriters and music fans invade the city for Tin Pan South. The world’s largest songwriter festival, produced by the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), just finished its 21st go-round, as some of the music industry’s most famed songwriters of past and present times performed [...]

Few popular music performers have been as polarizing as John Denver was. The man sold tens of millions of albums and was adored by fans of pop, adult contemporary and country. At the same time, he was downright reviled by many rock fans and music critics, especially urban ones, who considered his music bland and [...]

The Eastman MD915 is an F-style mandolin that has gained a reputation as a dependable top-of-the-line mando that isn’t a Gibson and, compared to many, is reasonably priced. We recently tried one out and were impressed with some of the instrument’s features, though maybe not all. The MD915 we played had pretty good action and [...]