archive
Music Reviews
Fame Studios And The Road To Nashville Songwriting Glory
June 12, 2013 One of America's great songwriters, Dan Penn has written dozens of soul classics, often with keyboardist Spooner Oldham. For a while, the two were on the staff of Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. Ace Records has just released an entire CD of Penn's demos.
Music Reviews
Arctic Records: Drafting A Blueprint For The Philly Sound
June 10, 2013 Ed Ward takes a look at Philadelphia's long and complex history of black pop music. Specifically, he looks at small labels like Arctic, where several famous artists got their start — and which has just released a set of CDs covering all 60 of its single releases.
Music Reviews
Jerry Lee Lewis: Live, Singing As If Life Depended On It
May 17, 2013 In 1958, Lewis suffered a precipitous decline in popularity when people learned that his new wife was not only 13, but also his cousin. Nobody would touch his records. Then, in 1963, he signed a deal with Smash and it looked like things were getting better.
Music Reviews
Johnny Cash's Columbia Catalog Out Now — As A 63-Disc Box Set
April 10, 2013 Cash spent half a century in the limelight as a country singer turned American icon. Between 1958, when he first recorded for Columbia, until 1986, when it didn't renew his contract, he recorded more than 50 singles and 60 albums for the label.
Music Reviews
The Moving Sidewalks: Where The British Invasion Met Texas Blues
March 13, 2013 Before he became the guitarist for ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons was in a band called the Moving Sidewalks that just missed its shot at stardom. The album the Moving Sidewalks never released in the late 1960s was released in late 2012 and is very much a period piece, albeit a very well-made one.
Music Reviews
Aretha Franklin Before Atlantic: The Columbia Years
February 27, 2013 Franklin found her voice in songs such as "I Never Loved a Man" for Atlantic Records in the 1960s. Before Atlantic, however, Franklin recorded for Columbia, and in those early recordings you can hear the legend just beginning to emerge.
Music Reviews
The Unsung Pioneer Of Louisiana Swamp-Pop
January 8, 2013 In the early 1960s, Joe Barry combined Cajun and country music into a whole new sound. In honor of a new anthology of Barry's music titled A Fool to Care, critic Ed Ward tells the forgotten musician's story.
Music Reviews
Turning Up The Volume On The Electric Blues
November 29, 2012 A new 12-disc compilation traces the history of electric blues from its inauspicious start through its heyday in the 1950s and '60s. Critic Ed Ward says Plug It In! Turn It Up! does "a great job of illuminating one particular aspect of the blues."
Music Reviews
The Insect Trust: An American Band Deconstructed
November 20, 2012 One of the great fantasies of the hippie era was that new combinations of music would emerge from the experimentation that was going on. Still, very few lived it. Ed Ward says The Insect Trust was one of the exceptions.
Music Reviews
The Big Man Behind 'Shake, Rattle And Roll'
October 22, 2012 Six feet tall, weighing in at 400 pounds and in his 40s when stardom hit him, Big Joe Turner is behind a load of rock 'n' roll hits. His hardest-hitting singles have been collected on a new compilation, titled Big Joe Turner Rocks.
Music Reviews
More Than This: The 'Complete' Roxy Music
October 15, 2012 Ed Ward connects the dots of the British band's eight studio albums, which were just collected in a box set.
Music Reviews
Out Of Industrial Wasteland, The English Beat Was Born
October 1, 2012 Ed Ward reviews the reissued catalog from the multiracial, multi-generational ska band.
Music Reviews
The Forgotten Story Of Memphis' American Studios
September 10, 2012 Memphis has been a music town since anyone can remember, and it's had places to record that music since there have been records. Some of its studios — Sun, Stax and Hi — are well-known, but American Studios produced its share of hits, and yet remains obscure.
Music Reviews
Harmony, Teenagers And 'The Complete Story Of Doo-Wop'
September 6, 2012 Street Corner Symphonies is a 15-volume year-by-year survey of doo-wop by scholar Bill Dahl.
Music Reviews
Autosalvage: The Psychedelic Band That Vanished
August 16, 2012 There are lots of stories about the band that got away. For rock historian Ed Ward, one of those groups has always been Autosalvage, a New York quartet who made one album and then stopped playing.
