Junior Brown’s playing is a hybrid blur of chicken pickin’ prestidigitation and salaciously slick slide. It’s as if he was channeling Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West simultaneously and couldn’t decide which one to pick. Flummoxed by the dilemma, Brown came up with an instrument that can do both — an instrument that can be played […]
Country
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Greener Grass Band
Rochester’s Greener Grass band rocks steady and rolls easy. It effortlessly blends elements of reggae, country, and blues, and swirls it into a heady blend of bonafied barroom rock ‘n’ roll. The music takes on a laid back casual tack despite its serious groove. It’s a flipped routine as if the music is playing the […]
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Good Listenin’
Just ask Austin-based country singing salvation Dale Watson and he’ll tell you. “Ameripolitan,” he says. “It’s a new genre. It’s what country used to be. And that’s what you’ll hear at my show. It’s honky-tonk, western swing, rockabilly, and outlaw.” That’s what it is, but Watson is quick to tell you what it isn’t as […]
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Low Flying Planes
If a perfect blend of cover songs and original material actually exists in a band’s arsenal, Wayne County’s Low Flying Planes may have found it. The band skates the razor. It’s found the balance — give the people what they want peppered with what you want them to want. The band arrived at this balance over its brief, […]
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“Pump Boys and Dinettes”
Lightweight musical revues generally have short lives, but “Pump Boys and Dinettes” has proved surprisingly hardy. First produced in the early 1980’s as the off-est of Off Broadway shows, it eventually moved to the Big Street and ran for a year and a half. Thirty years later it is still going strong. Geva put on […]
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Chuck Mead and his Grassy Knoll Boys
“We’re gonna make sure shit gets broke at Abilene,” promises country singer/songwriter/all-around rambunctious hillbilly cat, Chuck Mead. And though he and his band, the Grassy Knoll Boys, will undoubtedly tear up the joint, Mead is a respectful artist who speaks with an excited reserve when talking about his latest platter, “Back at the Quonset Hut.” […]
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Where have all the cowboys gone?
Country music is huge. Yet the appeal seems to drop off sharply when it comes to country music on a local level. Where are the bands? Where are the country-music fans the other days of the year that megastars like Chesney aren’t here?
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Concert Review: Kenny Chesney at CMAC
Dammit, someone lied to me and told me I was going to a country concert! Wednesday night, me and nearly 15,000 music fans piled into CMAC to dig on country superstar Kenny Chesney’s “No Shoes Nation” tour. The smattering of cowboy hats throughout the crowd looked as if a giant can of Pringles had been […]
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Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers
Seattle Weekly has called Zoe Muth that city’s version of Emmylou Harris. It’s high praise, but quizzical because of the Pacific Northwest’s history of producing singer/songwriters with more of an affinity for distorted guitars and an angsty lyrical approach. Muth was raised on old-school rock, but discovered the “Anthology of American Folk Music” in high […]
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Sean Patrick McGraw
He grew up in Rochester, but Nashville’s home now. And it’s the home of his music. Sean Patrick McGraw’s sound is a little closer to the bone and a little closer to the ground without grandstanding or kowtowing to country tradition. The man has spread himself out, as a support act for Toby Keith, by […]
