A country and western music venue in Scotland, nearly 4,000 miles and 150 years removed from the Civil War, voted this week to end its controversial display of the Confederate flag. Until recently, a night of live music at the Grand Ole Opry in Glasgow, a members’ club that holds public events, would end with […]
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Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre
THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It’s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri […]
Read MoreTracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ Named Song of the Year at 2023 CMAs
Tracy Chapman won song of the year at the Country Music Awards on Wednesday for “Fast Car,” a 1988 hit that topped the country charts this year thanks to a cover by the singer Luke Combs. Ms. Chapman, 59, is the first Black songwriter to win that award, Rolling Stone Magazine reported. She did not […]
Read MoreCMAT Makes Country Music Sad, Smart and Strange
Mattias Tellez, the album’s producer, said Thompson’s voice was “timeless, and powerful, and so distinct,” displaying “qualities I hear in the likes of Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald — that power, and control, and spontaneous humor.” The new album draws on Thompson’s life, looking back on a tumultuous relationship the singer began with an older […]
Read MoreEnough About Gram Parsons’s Death. It’s Time to Celebrate His Music.
Parsons’s best album, though, is also the one I find most difficult to listen to: his second solo effort, “Grievous Angel,” released posthumously in 1974, full of darkness but also Harris’s luminous backing vocals. Sometimes “Grievous Angel” just makes me angry, because his early death means we’ll never know if he could have written a […]
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