With Mark Olson returning as co-leader of The Jayhawks after 16 years away, Mockingbird Time marks a long-awaited reunion for nostalgic fans. Its familiar noises are pleasing, too â€" though it’s hard to believe this was ever a band which made music that sounded new.

Long ago, The Jayhawks...

If Long Line of Heartaches tends toward the generic in its approach to country â€" and it does â€" Connie Smith has more excuse than most. Her first ever hit, a 1964 reading of Bill Anderson’s Once a Day, remains an enduring and reliable country template. The song itself...

Rehabilitating the sound and vision that created a musical legend â€" let’s call it the Johnny Cash American Recordings model â€" is now standard practice for artists in their advanced years. The latest recipient is Glen Campbell, whose first ‘renaissance’, 2008 covers album Meet Glen Campbell, was...

Astute fans know that to attend a Levon Helm rambleâ€"especially one of his intimate rambles at his barn in Upstate New Yorkâ€"is to bare witness to a legend of American music. This live collectionâ€"a CD and a DVD sold separatelyâ€"is from a 2008 ramble at one of America’s finest auditoriums...

In the fifth decade of her career, and with a quiet regularity unusual for her species of kitsch megastar, Dolly Parton continues to make new records (Better Day is her sixth since the turn of the century). While she clearly believes that she got where she is through...

It may or may not be a coincidence that songs grappling with a working musician’s fearsâ€"receding youth while stardom doesn’t seem to get any closer (see “Yes You Are” and “Rock N Roll”)â€"appear on an album that’s also Grayson Capps’ most polished to date. Either way, the addition of organ...

Before he became the first African American to top the US country charts since Charlie Pride in 1983, Darius Rucker was best known as the voice of Hootie & The Blowfish, the bizarrely-named rockers whose 1994 debut album sold a staggering 16 million copies. Rucker’s decision to launch...

Firstly, this disc is blessed with an evocative title, and its song of the same name delivers the sounds to match. Where do we place Jewell, this country miss who also sounds like a darkly mysterious rock'n'roller, a blues-gal, a purveyor of garage exotica? She appears to be quite...

Fans of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and The Gaslight Anthem will lap up the ersatz blue-collar Americana of Danny Wilson, a south Londoner who appears to have been born to the sound of the screen door slamming and the sight of Mary’s dress waving. Wilson was...

Tony Furtado established himself as a prodigious picker early in his careerâ€"he won two National Bluegrass Banjo Championships, in 1987 and in ‘91. However, during the course of a 20-year career, he’s deftly navigated through several musical styles, in addition to being a fiery slide guitarist and itinerant folkie. Golden...