Jewly Hight

A young Oklahoman with Pentecostal roots looks at apocalypse from surprising angles, in music ranging from rockabilly to blues.

Young singers climbing the country charts, from Brothers Osborne to Maren Morris, are making a stylistic break with tradition by emphasizing restraint.

Over the decades, the myth around Terry Allen's 1975 album Juarez has grown into a fantastical, thing. Its tale has been fed by myriad creative offshoots (multi-media installations, radio and stage plays, a sculpture series, a musical theater collaboration with David Byrne etc.), and by the ...

The great novelist Flannery O'Conner once wrote that, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." This was her way of explaining why she populated her fiction with grotesquely flawed characters, exaggerating their ugliest impulses in the funhouse mirror of ...

At this point in Loretta Lynn's career, each new album is more than an album — it's also a tweaking of her legacy. She's been recording for more than half a century now, along the way collecting virtually every conceivable honor for contemporary and lifetime achievements, from CMA Entertainer ...

A few years back, both Adele and Bon Iver invoked Bonnie Raitt's adult-pop sophistication with their wistful covers of Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin's "I Can't Make You Love Me," a ballad she'd made famous at her early-'90s commercial peak. It was a reminder of the influence ...

Feminist theologian Wendy Farley once wrote that, "Over the edge of the horizon against which the objects of desire recede lies the world's final answer to all desire: death. The human mind does not tolerate this answer amicably." Musicians have found many different ways to deal with this existential dread: ...

Fame can be a myopic beast. Whatever first lands a person in the spotlight is the thing most likely to keep attracting attention ever after. Throughout Vince Gill's late-'80s-to-late-'90s commercial heyday in country's mainstream, it was his sensitive ballads — many with adult-pop sheen, some with modern honky-tonk melancholy, ...

There's a time-tested tradition in popular music of women speaking their minds about no-good men, a practice that links R&B diva Ruth Brown with alt-rocker Alanis Morissette and country foremother Loretta Lynn with pop queen Beyonce. We're accustomed to such songs liberating female anger in myriad forms, be it searing ...

It is a familiar posture: the popular musician who heroically resists the demands of mainstream popularity, aiming instead for loftier notions of statement making, authenticity flaunting, muse following and the like. Yet country acts tend to avoid such passion projects, at least until they've aged out of competing for radio ...

Few roots-leaning songwriters have inspired such intense adoration, or as much emulation, as Lucinda Williams. Since her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Williams has served as a template for many Americana hopefuls; if the bristly sensuousness of her songwriting voice is impossible to reproduce, plenty of ...

They start them young in bluegrass, grooming pre-tweens to master their instruments and study the standards of the bluegrass jam repertoire: all those hard-driving instrumental romps and high-and-lonesome odes to idealized cabin homes. Just about every kid picker wants to get to the point where she can jump in on ...

The ominous guitar intro that opens Aubrie Sellers' album — 45 seconds of tense, reverberating chord changes that move with exaggerated sluggishness — primes listeners for a brutish display of force. Maybe something along the lines of the sinewy groove that soon follows; that or a big-screen shootout. Certainly ...

Failure has always been a favorite topic of Texas troubadour Hayes Carll. Much of the songwriting catalog he's built up over the last dozen-plus years revolves around dashed dreams, doomed romance and drunken predicaments. Very often, though, he's leavened the losing with cleverly deployed gallows humor, self-deprecation and yarn spinning, ...

The whole point of fables like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" was to scare impressionable children into obedience; their safety could only be guaranteed if they didn't go around yanking the chains of the folks who could come to their rescue. Dylan LeBlanc's Cautionary Tale conveys less confidence in ...

There's a certain sort of vacancy to many holiday songs, their picturesque settings and sentiments functioning a bit like portrait studio backdrops, ready and waiting for somebody, anybody to walk into the frame and momentarily own and animate it with their presence. While one guesses that Kinky Friedman was hardly ...

Last year, the book Rednecks, Queers & Country Music — a significant, if overlooked work by scholar Nadine Hubbs — drove home just how powerful and pervasive outsider assumptions about the backwardness of rural identities and downhome music can be. Too often, we'll seize on a figure like Kim Davis ...

Contemporary country music has gotten an especially bad rap in recent years, routinely dismissed by outside observers as mindless, artless, suburban party fare. If ever there was a band equipped to challenge those characterizations, it's Old Dominion: singer Matthew Ramsey, guitarist and keyboardist Trevor Rosen, guitarist Brad Tursi, bassist Geoff ...

NPR Music is in Nashville all this week for the 16th annual AmericanaFest. So the newest episode of All Songs Considered offers a big bundle of music from some of the acts who are playing the festival that the team is most excited to see. Before leaving D.C., Bob called ...

Every style of music produces great songs: even in genres like house or rap, better known for ecstatic mixes and freestyle flows, songs are the going units of measurement. But Americana music lovers are the hierophants of great songwriting, bearing deep knowledge of the bardic traditions of country, folk and ...