Buck Owens turned Bakersfield, California into the epicenter of hip country music in the mid-'60s. All it took was a remarkable streak of number one singles that steam rolled right through Nashville with their electrified twang, forever changing the notion of what constituted country music and codifying the Bakersfield sound as hard-driving rhythms, trebly Telecasters, and lean arrangements suited for honky tonks, beer joints, and jukeboxes all across America. Half-a-century later, these remain sonic signifiers of Bakersfield, so the term no longer conveys a specific sound, place, and era, a situation the weighty Bear Family box The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974 intends to rectify.
It's difficult to call a guitarist who routinely shows up in the upper reaches of "100 Greatest Guitarists Ever" lists underappreciated, and yet the first impression the towering seven-disc box set Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective makes is that Duane Allman does not receive his proper due…
Follow-up volumes appeared in 1993 and 1996, extending the time period to 1979 and with additional songs from the 1972-76 period, available on cassette or CD (ALL 25 volumes were issued in both formats). Each volume has twelve songs. Despite the greater capacity of compact discs, the running time of each of the volumes is no longer than the limit of vinyl records in the 1970s, from 38 to 45 minutes long.
Part concert, part history lesson, part summit meeting, and all blues, Lightning in a Bottle puts a bright spotlight on this quintessential American music. There are some heavy hitters at work here, both behind the camera (Martin Scorsese executive produced, while the film was directed by Antoine Fuqua of Training Day and King Arthur) and especially in front of it, with a superb house band and a mind-boggling array of musicians (including B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Solomon Burke, Keb' Mo', Macy Gray, the Neville Brothers, Robert Cray, and John Fogerty, to name but a few) performing at New York's Radio City Music Hall in February, 2003…
Follow-up volumes appeared in 1993 and 1996, extending the time period to 1979 and with additional songs from the 1972-76 period, available on cassette or CD (ALL 25 volumes were issued in both formats). Each volume has twelve songs. Despite the greater capacity of compact discs, the running time of each of the volumes is no longer than the limit of vinyl records in the 1970s, from 38 to 45 minutes long.
AMERICAN EPIC, a film series produced by Allison McGourty, Duke Erikson and Director Bernard MacMahon, explores the pivotal recording journeys at the height of the Roaring Twenties, when music scouts armed with cutting-edge recording technology captured the breadth of American music and discovered the artists that would shape our world. The recordings they made of all the ethnic groups of America democratized the nation and gave a voice to everyone. Country singers in the Appalachians, Blues guitarists in the Mississippi Delta, Gospel preachers across the south, Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana, Tejano groups from the Texas Mexico border, Native American drummers in Arizona, and Hawaiian musicians were all recorded. It was the first time America heard itself.