Rick Shea Sweet Bernadine Tres Pescadores www.rickshea.com Folk-styled troubadour Rick Shea grew up in San Bernadino, an old Southern California railroad town, and cut his teeth in the truck-stop bars and honky-tonks there, honing … Continue reading →
Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on “Delia’s Gone” – See also Part 2 Introduction – “O, I am fortune’s fool!” I wonder if you’ve seen that ‘meme’ that goes in part like this – “Romeo and … Continue reading →
Nora Jones, video cap from the music video for “Miriam” Hell hath no fury… Quite some time ago, I shared a three bedroom apartment with three roommates, a man and two women. At some point, rather early in our time … Continue reading →
STEVE GILLETTE and CINDY MANGSEN Berrymania Compass Rose www.compassrosemusic.com Marvelous vocalists and acoustic multi-instrumentalists Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen have spent a lot of time driving around the country for the last two decades … Continue reading →
ALASDAIR FRASER and NATALIE HAAS Abundance Culburnie Records www.culburnie.com Classic Scots fiddlers like Niel Gow saw little contradiction between playing for a fashionable drawing room audience by day and sawing out tunes for village … Continue reading →
JENNIFER LEONHARDT Songs My Mother Sang Grassroots www.jenniferleonhardt.com This charming collection of traditional folk and hymns, plus one by Leonard Cohen, features simple arrangements and heartfelt emotion. It’s dedicated to the person who (one … Continue reading →
ROD PICOTT Hang Your Hopes On A Crooked Nail Welding Rod Records www.rodpicott.com Some songwriters adopt a blue-collar persona. For Picott, a former sheetrock worker, it’s an honest voice. After growing up in Maine … Continue reading →
Introduction We here at Murder Ballad Monday would love every week to bring you a fully researched ‘deep dive’ into a particular ballad, but time doesn’t always allow for that, given that we don’t make a penny from this work. … Continue reading →
Adrian Roye This is the second installment of two on the song “Josephine” by Adrian Roye, of Adrian Roye and the Exiles. You can read the first post here. Roye was kind enough to do a Skype interview with me … Continue reading →
Adrian Roye In our travels through the murder ballad genre, we go into a few kinds of terrain with some regularity. Sometimes, it’s a deep dive into an “old country” of traditional, if not ancient, murder ballads. These … Continue reading →
