Hillbilly Blues

Hillbilly Moon Explosion are a half-English 4-piece hidden away in Switzerland, where they've honed their craft without distraction for many years. Last in the UK in 2013, they straddle genres with ease, playing divergent gigs such as the Jazz Café, the Punk Rebellion Festival, Boomtown Festival, and as guests of the Swiss national team at the London Olympics. They set out on the road again in Spring 2016. Much revered in France, they were recently hired to help resurrect the career of the film star and singer Arielle Dombasle. She's recorded with the band an album of Hillbilly Moon cover versions, out now as 'French Kiss' on Universal.

There's something nicely defiant about the title to Alecia Nugent's third album, and her tone is a little bit sassier than usual as well. It opens with a saucily strutting blues number, which she just about pulls off – but the bluegrassy arrangement never quite leaves the ground and she never settles fully into the groove. She follows it up powerfully, though, with a pitch-perfect country weeper called "Don't Tell Me," and then hits you again with the title track, which features banjo deity J.D. Crowe.

When Dave Miller and Mark Tomorsky stand together with harmonica and guitar in hand to deliver the first notes of the song Ghost On A Roll, something amazing happens.

Old Jack’s Bones is our 4th studio album capturing our passion and telling the tale of Old Time String-band Music and Appalachian Folk. This isolated music evolved up in the Blue Ridge Mountains as waves of settlers seeking their own land came down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into SW Virginia between 1730 & 1830. These Scotch-Irish and Germans met with English and African families that were heading west from the older coastal Tidewater settlements making the Blue Ridge the first American Frontier. This saw a blending of culture, rhythms and religion creating a new American sound with fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, ballads and tunes.