americana | Musicosity

americana

Eve Selis

From her website: "Eve Selis isn’t just a “singer” — she’s an emotion transducer who converts country, R&B, blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll signals into a megawatt zap that galvanizes everyone in its path. And as with fellow femme-furnace frontwomen Bonnie Raitt, Joan Osborne, Maria McKee, Melissa Etheridge, and Lydia Pense, the cauterizing power of Selis’s voice can arc-weld material from almost any genre into a personal manifesto."

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Johnny Dowd

Johnny Dowd (born March 29, 1948 in Fort Worth, Texas) is an American alternative country musician from Ithaca, New York. Typical of his style are experimental, noisy breaks in his songs and strong gothic (in the sense of dark and gloomy) elements in the lyrics as well as in the music. There is also a strong undercurrent of black humor and the absurd in his work.

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Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Canadian singer and songwriter Neil Young includes his personal garage band Crazy Horse ("second best backing band in the world") to make raw and unpolished rock. Their gritty style of rock has influenced countless artists and music styles. Crazy Horse is best known for its long association with Young, despite having released five albums of its own over a 19-year span. It has been co-credited with Young as Neil Young and Crazy Horse on 13 albums, "Live at the Fillmore East" from the 1970 tour (2006) being the last.

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Caroline Herring

Caroline Herring is a Mississippi-born, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter. She started her career in Austin, TX, where she won the 2002 Best New Artist award in both the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Chronicle. There she released two albums: Twilight (2001) and Wellspring (2003). Herring relocated to Atlanta, and recently she won the 2008 Best Singer/songwriter award in Atlanta's Creative Loafing.

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The David Wax Museum

Tagged as "one of Boston's hottest new bands" by The Boston Globe, The David Wax Museum fuses exuberant Mexican roots music with rockin' country folk reminiscent of old school Jayhawks and early Wilco to create "Boston's homegrown answer to Calexico" (The Bostonist). They have toured with The Avett Brothers and have just completed their own six-week tour of the East Coast. Originally from Columbia, Missouri, the band is now based on Boston. Wax studied poetry and Latin American history at Harvard after spending two of his college years on a cattle ranch in California.

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Cory Chisel

Like notable musicians before him, singer-songwriter Cory Chisel forged his first connection to the power of song through the music he heard – and made – in church. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother played piano during services, and an upbringing surrounded by sermons and spirituals instilled in Cory the passion and portent of language and melody, and a fluency in the gospel’s rich vernacular of loss and redemption.

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The Jayhawks

Led by the gifted songwriting, impeccable playing, and honeyed harmonies of vocalists/guitarists Gary Louris and Mark Olson, the Jayhawks' shimmering blend of country, folk, and bar band rock made them one of the most widely acclaimed artists to emerge from the alternative country scene. The group sprung up in 1985 out of the fertile Minneapolis, Minnesota, musical community, where Olson had been playing standup bass in a rockabilly band called Stagger Lee until his desire to write and perform his own country-folk material prompted him to begin a solo career.

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Nels Andrews

Nels Andrews is an American folk singer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Known primarily as a folk singer, he served his apprenticeship with obscure but cult blues icon Washboard Williams. In 2002, Andrews was selected as a winner in the prestigious New Folk Competition at the annual Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas. In 2006, won the Telluride Bluegrass Festival's Troubadour Competition; later that same year he won the Mountain Stage New Song Competition. Andrews frequently appears in concert with A.J. Roach.

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