Here's 5 Shredding Country Guitar Songs, a feature at guitarworld.com has good quality video of some hot country guitar including Albert Lee doing Country Boy. Also check out 5 Shredding Bluegrass Songs (you can also go from the first feature), that includes an AMAZING superstar jam on I'm A Freeborn Man by Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor and Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. Very sweet.
Also want to recommend watching The Hellecasters doing Orange Blossom Special - besides the hellacious guitar playing it's an interesting study of how the 3 gents bring their own individual knack to the song.
I also love Bill Kirchen, the original guitarist of Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen ( a band a head of their time, and highly recommended), here doing his extended take on Hot Rod Lincoln.
Last but not least - Junior Brown - he sings like Ernest Tubb and plays a double contraption he built after dreaming about it, the Guit-Steel - a lap-steel combined with a regular guitar neck, and he plays the living hell out of both sides. Highway Patrol, My Wife Thinks You're Dead, and really out there (he loves Jimi) Guit-Steel Blues/Voodoo Chile. Heck, just found Junior with Warren Haynes playing Elmore James - blues, country, rock and roll are really all branches on the same tree.
@Greg (and GP, too): I don't want you to feel obliged to buy, or even like, any of these songs.
Here is another aspect of Southern consciousness in Country: Dwight Yoakam's "I sang Dixie". The reference to the song pulls two ways, arousing sentimental memories in some, raising questions of Antebellum (even Neo-Confederate) sentiment in others.
@BT, don't worry, I don't feel obliged. In fact it will probably take me a while to even listen to many of them, not least because things are really busy. But I am still glad for all the suggestions - I'll come back here and dip from time to time, like I've been doing with similar Jazz threads. It's really helpful to have folk list the stuff they care about - offers some promising places to start. It's fairly unlikely that I will suddenly acquire a large country collection but learning is always good, and it wouldn't be the first time I'd slowly added a genre to my loves that I didn't think I liked much.
Many thanks for these suggestions. I will certainly follow them up. I can't see me embracing country in the way I have with jazz, but you never know, some will make my regular playlist, I'm sure
In rambling around I came across this selection which I got a couple of years ago, 100 Rare '50's Rockabilly Tracks - the title is a bit of a misnomer in that numerous tracks could just as well be called country from the rocking honky tonk tradition, illustrating how fuzzy the boundaries can be from back then. Best part, it's $4.40, for a rocking collection including the original I Got A Rocket In My Pocket, and Bop-A-Lena, songs which anyone with a rocking bone in their body needs to have.
For those who have acquired an aversion to the genre of country music but are open to a little exploring despite the trepidation, this is a good album to test the country waters. All the songs stay true to the genuine old country sound before it was paired with a modern poppish nonsense - despite the fact that the artist is a Brit with a pop and punk-rocking past.
What they say about this album: "Lowe's 1994 The Impossible Bird is a low-key, easy-going album which has a lot more to do with 1956 country music than with 1978 punk."
I believe the gist of this album is that these are the originals, or at least older versions, of songs featured in O, Brother, Where Art Thou? O Brother This Is Americana. I don't know that it's the best bargain but it is a nice collection, $8.99.
It bothers me to hear Nickle Creek (for example) called bluegrass because they have guitar, Mando and fiddle. They could play bluegrass, but they are more of a folk / neo-folk / pop ensemble.
I accept this grudgingly. There are a lot of groups that are described as BG hybrids because of their instrumentation. Indeed, Nickel Creek played alternative pop songs with Beach Boys harmonies. However, their music was built on BG elements, something that can't be said of many other groups: that interlocking of instruments that only a BG band has. There not being BG has more to do with the rather restrictive definitions employed by the genre's practitioners.
Well, I ran across this 2 disc comp at eMu - Country:The American Tradition on the Columbia/Legacy label. It is a bit rushed by my standards to try and cram a history of that many decades of country into 2 discs, but it's a respectable effort. Disc One starts in the old-timey/folky/bluegrass/western swing type arena and moves onward. Disc 2 has a few numbers as we approach the modern era that are a little too vanilla for my tastes but are all real legitimate hits, and as comps go it is pretty solid quality. So if anyone feels the need to wet their feet in a broad spectrum kind of country way it's not a bad starting point.
Thanks BDB - it's not available in the UK on emusic, but as we pay track pricing anyway it would have been expensive. But it is the kind of thing I probably need so I'll try to search it out somewhere else
Just stumbled across this Bear Family series over at Amazon - Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Hillbilly Music:Country and Western Hit Parade. It goes by year volumes, back to 1945, and there are some new ones coming out '61-'65. I put them up here for reference mostly - I love Bear Family releases for their depth and knowledge but they are an expensive passion, CD only?/mostly? as far as I know, but they are usually primo and right on, so if you'd like a stroll through what was happening in real gritty country year by year they'd be a good thing to check out.
Comments
Also want to recommend watching The Hellecasters doing Orange Blossom Special - besides the hellacious guitar playing it's an interesting study of how the 3 gents bring their own individual knack to the song.
I also love Bill Kirchen, the original guitarist of Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen ( a band a head of their time, and highly recommended), here doing his extended take on Hot Rod Lincoln.
Last but not least - Junior Brown - he sings like Ernest Tubb and plays a double contraption he built after dreaming about it, the Guit-Steel - a lap-steel combined with a regular guitar neck, and he plays the living hell out of both sides. Highway Patrol, My Wife Thinks You're Dead, and really out there (he loves Jimi) Guit-Steel Blues/Voodoo Chile. Heck, just found Junior with Warren Haynes playing Elmore James - blues, country, rock and roll are really all branches on the same tree.
Here is another aspect of Southern consciousness in Country: Dwight Yoakam's "I sang Dixie". The reference to the song pulls two ways, arousing sentimental memories in some, raising questions of Antebellum (even Neo-Confederate) sentiment in others.
emusic link
For those who have acquired an aversion to the genre of country music but are open to a little exploring despite the trepidation, this is a good album to test the country waters. All the songs stay true to the genuine old country sound before it was paired with a modern poppish nonsense - despite the fact that the artist is a Brit with a pop and punk-rocking past.
What they say about this album: "Lowe's 1994 The Impossible Bird is a low-key, easy-going album which has a lot more to do with 1956 country music than with 1978 punk."