Linda Fahey

On April 5, 2014, David Lamb, one half of the Providence, R.I., duo Brown Bird, lost his year-long battle with leukemia. After being diagnosed in the spring of 2013, Lamb underwent a bone-marrow transplant in the fall, and during the months of treatment and recovery he continued to make ...

When David Lamb, half of the Rhode Island-based duo Brown Bird, succumbed to an aggressive relapse of leukemia in April 2014 after a year-long battle with the disease, the music world lost one of the most exciting, intriguing and original voices this reviewer had heard in years. Not only that, ...

Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle (a.k.a. Anna & Elizabeth) combine their love of storytelling, their beautiful voices and their interest in the visual arts to share Appalachian ballads and traditional music with a new generation of music lovers.

Together, they just released their self-titled second album, and stopped into ...

Pharis and Jason Romero are from Horsefly, British Columbia — population 1,000, in the foothills of the Cariboo Mountains — where they write and sing modern-day folk ballads. Their tales of wandering, loneliness and "local characters" with an independent spirit will challenge you to identify which are original compositions and ...

After quietly releasing three albums on their own in 2010 and 2011, the North Carolina duo Mandolin Orange (Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin) broke quickly onto the folk and Americana scene with their acclaimed album This Side of Jordan, released by YepRoc in 2013. Since then, it's been constant touring ...

Caitlin Canty's Reckless Skyline — the second full-length album from the Vermont singer-songwriter, who's about to relocate to Nashville — was recorded live in four days in a western Massachusetts studio. With fellow songwriter Jeffrey Foucault at the helm as producer, Canty works with an all-star band that includes Billy ...

Pieta Brown says she didn't find the guitar; the guitar found her. The daughter of singer-songwriter Greg Brown grew up surrounded by music and wrote her first song when she was only 3. By age 8, she was writing poetry and instrumental music on the piano, eventually picking ...

From legends to upstarts, the year in roots music had something for everyone, with highlights ranging from the solo acoustic sketches of Steve Dawson to the orchestra-backed epics of First Aid Kit.

One of the threads tying together several of our top 10 albums (chosen by our friends at

The Nashville string band The Howlin' Brothers — Jared Green, Ian Craft and Ben Plasse — got its name from a classical-guitar teacher in Ithaca, N.Y. There, the group was known for its lively performances of old-time and bluegrass music around campfires. Shortly thereafter, The Howlin' Brothers headed to ...

The best folk music released in 2013 was, almost without exception, of the intensely personal variety. These remarkable albums struggled with addiction and death, coming of age, faith and the unstoppable rhythm of change. Three of these releases came from well-loved artists making music in ways that nobody saw coming. ...

First things first: Aoife O'Donovan's first name is pronounced EE-fuh. It's worth knowing how to speak it out loud, because a lot of people are going to talk about O'Donovan's first solo album, Fossils, which comes out Tuesday.

The lead singer of the folk-country band Crooked Still recently performed a ...