Jewly Hight

There was a clear path laid out for Gary Clark Jr. If he'd wanted, he could have allowed himself to be crowned the young, African-American savior of 21st-century blues guitar. After all, the guy came up in the clubs of Austin, apprenticed under Jimmie Vaughan (brother of

Ruby Amanfu made an incredible impression as Jack White's visual and vocal foil during live and recorded performances of his 2012 single "Love Interruption" — she as the inscrutable, bouffant-sporting woman of color, possessed of a live-wire vibrato, and he as the spectral, stylized rocker. Considering that that ...

McCoy is best known as a harmonica player, but the studio veteran also played a big role in the pivotal moment when counter-cultural folk-rock came to Music City.

There was a time when rock critics regularly described Miranda Lambert as some sort of vengeful, arson-happy, petite, blond Amazonion, thanks both to the potent imagery in some of her early singles and the critical tendency to view the characters which inhabit country songs in a ...

After years of writing hits for stars like Kenny Chesney and Miranda Lambert, Chris Stapleton has released an album that's entirely his own.

One need not follow mainstream country music to have heard half a dozen country singles released this decade, or fragments of them at least. This past January, a mashup of swaggering bro-country hits by chart fixtures and relative newbies Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, ...

Sam Doores and Riley Downing could've gone the troubadour route, singing solitary songs and traveling alone, unencumbered. The two singer-songwriters met at Woodyfest, after all, the annual celebration of Woody Guthrie. Doores had already taken to heart Guthrie's self-mythologizing in Bound For Glory and tried to retrace some of his ...

It took Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell nearly four decades to get around to making their first duets album, Old Yellow Moon, and just two years to follow it with The Traveling Kind. Their collaborative debut may have swept two of the biggest awards in their genre — ...

Daniel Levi Goans and Lauren Plank Goans are used to fielding questions about the overlap between their musical and marital partnerships. If anything, they've invited this sort of curiosity by telling their backstory the way they have: him striking up a conversation after overhearing her singing to herself at a ...

Over the last few years, Jessie Baylin has probably received more media attention for having a child with her husband, Kings Of Leon drummer Nathan Followill, than she has for making music. She hasn't released an album since 2012's Little Spark and was unsure if and when she'd record another. ...

There are four official members of Houndmouth: guitarist Matt Myers, keyboardist Katie Toupin, drummer Shane Cody and bassist Zak Appleby, all of whom also pitch in with the singing and songwriting. But far more people than that contribute to their second album, Little Neon Limelight. Only artful alt-roots producer ...

The Nashville country pop band doesn't have a single lead singer; they take turns, which opens artistic and emotional possibilities. The band recently released its sixth studio album, Pain Killer.

There was a time when you could hear instrumental music on Top 40 radio right alongside big-name singers. But, with a few exceptions, the heyday of pop instrumentals ended three decades ago.

Jeremy Fetzer and Spencer Cullum Jr. are trying to recapture that era. Separately, the two Nashville-based musicians earn ...

Mac Wiseman is the kind of person who hangs on to things. At his home outside Nashville, the 89-year-old country balladeer points out a round dining table made of dark, grainy oak.

"It's the only one my mom ever had," he says. "She bought it when she and Dad got ...

Justin Townes Earle's album covers have always offered variations on a theme: For each of his full-lengths, he's posed in a different setting with a different anonymous woman. But for Single Mothers, his fifth album, the newly married Americana fixture keeps his own mug out of the picture altogether ...

Christopher Denny's voice wasn't the easiest to place when he debuted with Age Old Hunger in 2007. His sensitive vibrato was likened to Roy Orbison's, but there's really quite a chasm between the Big O's ethereal elegance and Denny's more earthbound timbre and flickers of humor.

Now that home studios and laptop rigs enable musicians to document their music with minimal travel, the recording environments they choose have increasingly become part of their art. Like destination weddings, part of the point of destination recording sessions is immersion in particular environments. When the sessions take place at ...

The breakup songs that offer instant gratification, to songwriter and listener alike, are often the ones that either strike while the anger is hot or skip right to the part where a busted old love is replaced by a new one. Those are the fast-paced action scenes of romantic dissolution. ...

The cover art of Dolly Parton's latest album looks like an airbrushed T-shirt design you might find in a souvenir shop at Dollywood. Both her flawless, beaming close-up and the mountainous skyline behind are her ringed in artist-rendered ribbons of mist, and the rising sun has a painterly, paradisiacal ...