Windham Hill A Winter's Solstice

Folksongs for a Nuclear Village was Shadowfax's sixth album and its first not to be released on the label Windham Hill…

Texas-born singer Z.Z. Hill managed to resuscitate both his own semi-flagging career and the entire genre at large when he signed on at Jackson, MS-based Malaco Records in 1980 and began growling his way through some of the most uncompromising blues to be unleashed on black radio stations in many a moon. His impressive 1982 Malaco album Down Home Blues remained on Billboard's soul album charts for nearly two years, an extraordinary run for such a blatantly bluesy LP. His songs "Down Home Blues" and "Somebody Else Is Steppin' In" have graduated into the ranks of legitimate blues standards (and few of those have come along over the last couple of decades)

Hard core ZZ Top and Texas Blues fans know who Rocky Hill is. Very few others do, however, and that's a shame.
Rocky Hill was the brother of ZZ Top bass player and vocalist Dusty Hill, and in fact played in a psychedelic Blues band with Dusty in the late 60's. That band, a trio called American Blues, also included a certain drummer by the name of Frank Beard. Right there you had two-thirds of the future ZZ Top ready to go.
After the band broke up (with three albums to their credit) Beard joined a band being put together by a guitar player/singer named Billy Gibbons. When their bass player left Beard suggested his American Blues bandmate Dusty Hill, and the rest is history…