Country Music
Amanda Shires Isn’t Letting Nashville, or Her Marriage, Off the Hook
Amanda Shires wasn’t trying to name-drop, honest. It’s just that she’s been working alongside country music legends since she was 15, so most of the characters who populate her anecdotes happen to need no introduction. My onyx ring reminded her of one John Prine once gave her — which she promptly dropped down a sewer […]
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Can Luke Combs, Country’s Everyman, Grow Up Without Losing Touch?
CHARLOTTE, Tenn. — On a warm, clear Tuesday in May, Luke Combs offered a visitor a ride around his property in rural Tennessee on one of his Polaris utility vehicles. The 140-acre parcel of forests, fields and streams is about an hour from Nashville. It includes a pool, a beach volleyball court, a chicken coop […]
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Naomi Judd Died of a Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound, Her Daughter Says
When Naomi Judd, the Grammy-winning country music singer, died last month, her daughter Ashley Judd said that she had lost her mother to the “disease of mental illness.” On Thursday, Ms. Judd was more candid, saying in a television interview that her mother had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her home in Tennessee, […]
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Mickey Gilley, Country Star Whose Club Inspired ‘Urban Cowboy,’ Dies at 86
Mickey Leroy Gilley was born on March 9, 1936, in Natchez, Miss., to Irene (Lewis) and Arthur Gilley. Raised in nearby Ferriday, La., he grew up singing gospel harmonies with his cousins Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis, and sneaking into local juke joints with them to hear blues and honky-tonk music. Mr. Gilley’s mother bought […]
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Naomi Judd, of Grammy-Winning the Judds, Dies at 76
Naomi Judd, who as one half of the mother-daughter duo the Judds dominated the country music charts in the 1980s with a blend of tight vocal harmonies, traditional arrangements and modern pop aesthetics, died on Saturday outside Nashville. She was 76. Ashley Judd, the actress, confirmed her mother’s death on Twitter. She did not specify […]
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Drugs, Planes, Bail: The Wild Story of George Jones’s Lost Recordings
Decades later, it remains something of a mystery how in 1966 George Jones and his band ended up at Nugget Studios, a backwater building just north of Nashville that advertised itself as a place for “country music recorded in the quiet of the country at country prices.” Jones, a country music legend in the making, […]
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Camila Cabello Gets in Her Head, and 16 More New Songs
Alienation gets an electronic lilt in “Psychofreak” from Camila Cabello’s “Familia,” which is actually stacked with songs about jealousy. In “Psychofreak” she sings about feeling dissociated, insecure and suspicious: “Tryin’ to get connected, no Wi-Fi/tell me that you love me, are you lying?” Against brittle percussion and impassive chords on the off-beats, Cabello sounds relatively […]
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Harry Styles Tries On Synth-Pop, and 13 More New Songs
In “As It Was,” Harry Styles latches on to the kind of peppy electro-pop that the Weeknd updated from groups like a-ha. The song is from Styles’s third album, “Harry’s House,” due May 20, and its insistently upbeat production stokes the ambiguity of the lyrics. When he sings, “In this world, it’s just us/You know […]
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Dolly Parton Refused the Rock Hall of Fame
But Ms. Parton has been eligible for the honor since 1992, and her nomination this year may have more to do with the fact that the Hall of Fame is often criticized for tapping so few female members — “In 2019, a look at the organization’s 888 inductees up to then found that just 7.7 […]
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