Americana Unsung
The true* stories of alt.country’s lesser lights.
Ämülët
Unless your band is The Supremes, The Ramones, or AC/DC and you’ve already hit on perfection, there’s no shame in adapting your art to suit the times, in evolving it to reflect your changing interests, knowledge, and personal development. Legacy artists have often found well-springs of creativity and challenge (not to mention commercial success) by…
Jeffrey Friedman
Jeffrey Friedman, formerly the bass player of Storm & Twang and front man of The Fried Men, took what little earnings he got from a publishing deal that he’d lucked into upon first arriving in Los Angeles, and started a lucrative pot growing business out of his Eagle Rock…
HUCK PAXTON
Normally we at Americana Unsung research and write our own profiles of alt. country’s lesser lights. Recently, however, we received an unsolicited auto-biography from former Bloodshot & Yep Roc recording artist Huck Paxton. Not that we necessarily want to encourage this sort of thing, we felt this story was simply too good not to publish.…
Boner Jack
There existed back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s an underground music scene as lively, wilful, and independent as Stiff, SST, and Sub-Pop combined. This scene was made up of the pro- and semi-pro musicians who played a circuit of private members-only bars operated by fraternal and veterans’ organizations such as the Fraternal Order of…
Junior Jr.
It only takes one decent record collection and some open-minded parents to get a kid thrilled about the glory of music and songwriting. Start them out young, and the possibilities are infinite. Junior Jr.’s story, juvenile punk rock band turns alt. country Native American artistic well-spring, is enough for a feature-length documentary, but Americana Unsung…
Ralph Lee Gimmel
Country Music aficionados will tell you that it was right about the time Curb Records started a Music Business School in Nashville when things just went to hell. Similar programs soon sprung up at major universities across the US, effectively making Frat Boys the majority tastemakers in the music biz. Waylon Jennings himself…
The Johnnys
Bluegrass has had more than its fair share of internecine brawls. Divisions between traditional ‘Bill-Done-It-This-Way’ devotees and the laid-back progressives have grown quite marked over the years and it’s led to some of the meanest, most judgmental muso-backstabbing ever to take place in American music history. No sociologist could ever been able to truly explain…
Oak & Ash & Sand & Nail
This remarkably unremarkable short-lived trio (and some-time equally unremarkable quartet) from the well-to-do North Atlanta suburb, Vinings, GA. were college-boy, roots-rock dilettantes with too much time and money on their hands. They never bothered to listen to, much less learn a single Kris Kristofferson song. Their whole shtick was less “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and more…
Grand Dad Opry
“Ya gotta have a gimmick,” or so advised the late Stephen Sondheim in his 1959 musical Gypsy. Well, Antony Spumoni thought he had a doozy. The concept was simple: Sing country songs in cod-operatic style and wait for the variety show dollars to start rolling in. That this particular shtick failed for so long was not…
Lefty Wrong
Born Laurence Krantz, Lefty Wrong looms small as an archetypal “What If…” story in the annals of Americana. Krantz’s parents were circus carnies and, being in the business of show, were forever entertaining visitors with the stage props and musical instruments to hand around the Krantz home. It was no place for a child. Juggling…
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Americana Unsung 