News - 24/10/2014

Fats Domino Documentary Debuts at New Orleans Film Fest; Kenny Chesney Returns to the Road; O’Donovan, Pikelny Collaborate

Music City Roots’ Craig Havighurst interviewed Joe Mullins about keeping bluegrass alive on the radio. (warning: autoplay)

Ryan Bingham will release Fear and Saturday Night on January 20. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal premiered one of Bingham’s new songs, “Broken Heart Tattoos.”

Here’s Aoife O’Donovan and Noam Pikelny collaborating on a lovely version of “Don’t That Road Look Rough and Rocky.”

New documentary The Big Beat premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival yesterday. The film, directed by Joe Lauro, tells “the story of one of the defining partnerships of rock ‘n’ roll: that between New Orleans piano royalty Fats Domino and musician-songwriter Dave Bartholomew. Built around both new interviews and archival recordings, it tells a story with its roots in the city’s Lower 9th Ward but one with ultimately global ramifications.”

After taking a year off from touring, Kenny Chesney plans to return to the road this spring. The Big Revival Tour will begin March 26 in Nashville. (via press release)

During the encore of his second artist-in-residence show at the Country Music Hall of Fame, Alan Jackson sported his ‘90s duds: sleeveless flannel shirt, holey jeans, and a sweet mullet.

The Stray Birds were featured on an episode of World Cafe: Next earlier this week.

Emma Lord moved to Nashville to pursue her songwriting dreams. After a few months, she came to this conclusion: It’s a harsh reality that you really only understand when you are in Nashville: you are a dime a dozen. There are a hundred thousand girls there who look just like you, who sing just like you, who write songs just as well as you do. In Nashville, it isn’t always about who has the most talent because everybody there has talent. It’s about who perseveres, who shows up, who happens to be in the right places at the right times and doesn’t get discouraged by rejection – or worse than rejection, nothing happening at all.

The Department of African American Studies at Yale will hold a panel called “Exploring the Rise and Fall of Paramount Records” on October 28. Participants will include Jack White, whose Third Man Records has released two Paramount Records box sets in conjunction with Revenant Records, music journalist Greil Marcus, and Adia Victoria.

Check out the track listing for Willie and Bobbie Nelson’s forthcoming release December Day (out December 2), the first installment in the “Willie’s Stash” series.

Peter Cooper writes about The Sutler, a new venue in Nashville whose name references…The Sutler, a “long-shuttered, divey little joint” that, in the 1990s, “became a center of Nashville’s roots music scene and an incubator for the artists who would in the new century be called ‘Americana.’”

Randy Lewis of The L.A. Times wrote a fine piece on the Glen Campbell documentary I’ll Be Me. An excerpt: The documentary shows doctor visits Campbell couldn’t comprehend, sometimes testy rehearsals with his band, a 2012 trip to the Grammy Awards to perform and accept a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the occasional trek to the golf course that had long been another of his passions. The film doesn’t flinch from the harsh realities of Alzheimer’s, showing Campbell losing his temper at times with loved ones and frequently falling back on the jovial manner that made him an engaging star of “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” variety series that ran on CBS from 1969-71. “I got to know Johnny Cash at the end of his life, and when he made the ‘Hurt’ video, he said, ‘I want people to see the ugly truth.'” [director James Keach] said. “I think what Glen is doing is the same — he’s being incredibly honest and vulnerable in putting himself out there this way.”

Here’s Sturgill Simpson playing “Turtles All the Way Down” for BBC Radio Scotland.