Randy Wood describes himself as “old fashioned” as we sit in his workroom in Bloomingdale, Georgia, only minutes down the road from historic Savannah. On the walls hang unfinished instruments and seasoned tools. Each work station is stocked with carpenter’s glue, a sanding stone and a variety of utensils for crafting or restoration. He cradles [...]

“Long Black Veil” (Written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkins) “The scaffold is high and eternity near.” Those words, perhaps the most chilling from “Long Black Veil,” one of the most haunting murder ballads you’ll ever hear, have been sung by a whole lot of folks over the years, including iconic voices like Burl Ives, Jerry [...]

The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song Frank M. Young and David Lasky Abrams Between 1927 and 1944, the A.P., Maybelle, and Sara Carter made hundreds of recordings and sold millions of records, catapulting them into country music superstardom. Their recordings of “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” have become [...]

Johnny Cash started his tenure as a Columbia Recording artist in 1958, when he was 26 years old. On October 30, Columbia will release the fruits of his labors – a staggering 63-disc collection — with Johnny Cash — The Complete Columbia Album Collection. “For 28 years,” writes Rich Kienzle in the liner notes, “or [...]

What do country musicians listen to when they want to be inspired? We asked a handful of artists (and a few record execs for good measure) to create a list of their top 5 favorite country songs – and they compiled the perfect playlist. Blake Shelton Top Five ‘80s Country Hits “My Baby’s Got Good [...]

Sting has written some really great songs that won’t go down as classics or standards because, frankly, his vocabulary and melodies are usually more sophisticated than what the pop market can bear. But in “I Hung My Head,” from his 1996 album Mercury Falling, Sting managed to – as Malcolm X says at the beginning [...]

In the early history of recorded country music, the recordings were done in places other than Nashville. Country guitar players in the 1920s included Sam McGee, Riley Puckett, and the legendary songwriter Jimmie Rodgers, but there was no such thing as a “session player” back then. Maybelle Carter and The Carter Family recorded the classic [...]

We here at American Songwriter love Lera Lynn – check out her awesome cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” that she recorded just for us. Now the singer-songwriter turns her attention to a local icon from our neck of the woods (Nashville). “I always thought June Carter’s ‘Ring of Fire’ was written as [...]

House Of Cash: The Legacies Of My Father, Johnny Cash John Carter Cash (Insight Editions) Rating: Stuffed to the brim with family pictures, handwritten notes, setlists, and discarded lyric sheets, this 150-page coffee table book paints the The Man in Black as a colorful guy. John Carter Cash takes us into his dad’s personal archives [...]

During a hometown show on December 31, 1989, Bono took a minute to air his band’s dirty laundry. U2 had entered the final stretch of the Lovetown Tour, launched earlier that year to help promote Rattle And Hum, and the guys were beyond exhausted. There were family issues to deal with; Bono’s wife had given birth to [...]

X5 compilations have topped the iTunes classical music charts. Now they’re taking on Sun Records catalog. X5 Music Group is a Stockholm-based music startup that is helping to rethink the way labels package and release albums digitally. X5 licenses classical music catalogs and creates attractively-priced digital albums that appeal to a younger demographic. X5′s business [...]

Creativity – the muse – is a bit of a troublemaker. If she likes you, you’re in heaven. If she doesn’t, you’re in hell. Every songwriter who has ever faced a blank page knows all about her capricious personality, but never loses interest in her. Sometimes, though, we should be careful of what we wish [...]