Hot Tuna – Live at New Orleans House Berkely, CA 9/69
Poco – Live at Columbia Studios Hollywood 30/9/71
Poco – The Songs of Paul Cotton
New Riders of The Purple Sage- The Best Of
Barefoot Jerry – Watching TV With The Radio On/You Can’t Get Off With Your Shoes On
Pure Prairie League- Firin’ Up
We’ve got a good tranche of reissues here which in a way show the journey of what we used to call country rock back in the seventies. First off is a 1969 live recording from Hot Tuna, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s spin off band from the Jefferson Airplane. Although they eventually morphed into a power trio Hot Tuna initially kicked off playing country blues with Kaukonen on acoustic guitar and Live at New Orleans House is a generous 70 minute capture of their early days when they were whiling away their time while Grace Slick was recovering from throat surgery. A selection of songs from this show were released as the first Hot Tuna album but here we get a shed load of others which could just as easily could have been featured. Kaukonen was going back to his roots, Rev. Gary Davis and such, which he learned to play in Texas along with a young Janis Joplin. His distinctive voice and accomplished finger picking is well aided by Casady’s fluid and sturdy bass playing while Will Scarlett adds harmonica on several songs. They run through songs by Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, Leroy Carr and Lightin’ Hopkins among others with the highlights being a fine delivery of Death Don’t Have No Mercy and a snappy rendition of Blind Blake’s Never Happen No More with Kaukonen’s guitar playing spritely. It’s well recorded and quite intimate and well worth a listen.
Fast forward two years and we have Poco Live at Columbia Studios, Hollywood in 1971, featuring their most solid line up of Richie Furay, Paul Cotton, Rusty Young, Timothy B. Schmidt and George Grantham. It relies heavily on songs from their then current release, From The Inside but with space to showcase Furay’s Buffalo Springfield song, Child’s Claim to Fame along with Pickin’ Up The Pieces from their debut album. Poco of course were the somewhat unsung pioneers of country rock but here they rock out on occasion and add some fine slurps of southern influenced grooves while there are moments when they seem to anticipate Steve Still’s use of Latin American music in Manassas. On this evidence they were certainly funkier than the fledgling Eagles who were just taking off around this time. The clamour and clash of guitar and pedal steel with some fine harmonies on Hear That Music along kicks ass while What A Day has the melodic finesse and fiery fury of a Moby grape song. The recording here is not as clean as on the Hot Tuna disc but crank it up and open a bottle and it’s a great listen.
It’s Poco again on a selection of songs written by the man who replaced Jim Messina from the original line-up on Poco – The Songs of Paul Cotton. Cotton added some muscle to the band along with some excellent song writing. One Horse Blue and Ride The Country are both stalwart songs while Western Waterloo bashes along with some fantastic pedal steel, banjo and squirreling guitar. Blue Water meanwhile is as sinewy a bluegrass influenced country rock song as you would want to hear. Ten songs long it’s an excellent introduction to this severely underrated songwriter.
While Poco were establishing the ground rules for country rock those psychedelic cowboys from the west coast, The Grateful Dead, were dipping their toes into country music eventually begetting The New Riders of The Purple Sage. Here we have a Best Of collection (expanded from a 1976 vinyl release) which, again, is a handy primer for those yet to hear these hippie born celebrations of country music. Their laidback early style is well captured on Glendale Train and Last Lonely Eagle from their first album with Buddy Cage’s pedal steel weeping and wonderful. From their magnificent The Adventures of Panama Red album we get the powerful rush of Kick In The Head, which sounds like Bob Weir leading an energised Dead with Cage thrashing about on fuzzed pedal steel, along with the glorious title song, one of the great hippie country anthems.
The pick of the crop here is the straightforward bundling of two mid seventies albums from Barefoot Jerry (You Can’t Get Off With Your Shoes On and Watching TV With The radio On) on one CD. barefoot Jerry were a shifting bunch of seasoned Nashville pickers led by Wayne Moss who played guitar on Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman, was one of the crew on Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde and who formed Area Code 561, the band responsible for Stone Fox Chase AKA the theme music for The Old Grey Whistle Test. With the rest of the band having a similar pedigree this outfit really could play just about anything and so here they wander from southern rock to western swing to hippie dope anthems and scintillating instrumental workouts. If anything they were just too eclectic and really never achieved much more than cult status. Watchin’ TV… still stands the test of time and is a highly recommended listen, the title song and Funny Looking Eyes could easily have been released recently by the likes of Sam Morrow or Andrew Sheppard, both having a tough southern slink. The instrumentals, Pig Snoots and Nehi Red and Two Mile Pike, allow the band to show off their chops and really have to heard to be believed while the delicate acoustic number If There Were Only Time For Love harks back to their magnificent debut album (which you really should search out). The albums ends on a (ahem) high note with the cosmic dope anthem, Mother Nature’s Way of Saying High, which is not a million miles removed from David Crosby’s musings on his solo debut. You Can’t Get Off… pales in comparison but it’s still well worth a listen with the opening tale of Ali Babba a fine chunky slice of southern rock, Slowin’ Down a down home country rock number in the manner of The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and the title song a rip snorting funky number sounding like the Band on amphetamines. If you’ve never barefooted with Barefoot Jerry then here’s your chance.
Winding up this roundup is a 1980 release from Pure Prairie League, a band perhaps better known on these shores for the emblematic Norman Rockwell cowboy, Lucky Luke, who appeared on all their album covers. They had a sizeable success in the States although by the time of this album none of the original members were present but they had inducted a new member, the fledging Vince Gill. Gill injected new blood into the band and the album achieved top 40 status but there’s precious little down home music here with the band playing for the audiences who were lapping up the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. As such there’s some very polished rockers here, She’s All Mine is classic FM fodder and it still sounds great with a fine twin guitar solo spiralling away while I‘ll Be Damned is an excellent country rocker which benefits from Gill’s bluegrass background.
All the above are available from Floating World Records
She’s the self styled Queen of Oklahoma but Carter Sampson extended her sovereignty into European territories with the 2016 release of Wilder Side, her first album to see distribution on this side of the water. Its success saw her playing at the Maverick, Glastonbury and Kilkenny Roots festivals as part of the eight tours of Europe she has undertaken in the past two years and on the eve of another visit we get a brand new album to whet our appetite.
On this, their third full studio album, Birds of Chicago firm up what has been called their “secular gospel” sound, the trademark harmonies of Allison Russell and JT Nero still to the fore but with the music slightly more muscular as befits an album which slyly cocks a snoot at the world of fake news and atrocities we currently live in. It’s not a political album nor a collection of protest songs, rather it’s a celebration of life and love, the antidote they believe to troubled times, and not just romance. It’s all kinds of love, maternal, familial, the ties that bind us and shape us. As Nero said to The Chicago Times, “We didn’t want to make a heavy-handed record, but a joyful rock ’n’ roll record while acknowledging that the stakes feel high.”
Edinburgh based Al Shields has been carving a bit of a reputation on the local Americana scene over the past couple of years. Here he ditches his usual acoustic presentation for a full blooded band sound giving us six songs which are all fine country flavoured rock numbers and which display his admiration for the likes of Jason Isbell along with some venerable artists who have walked this road before. Melodic, with curling guitars and a flavour of sweet pedal steel playing, Shields and his Delahayes have turned in a most welcome collection.
A four piece from Michigan, Cold Tone Harvest remind one of an earlier manifestation of what we call Americana these days. Listening to their muscular amalgamation of rock rhythm with banjo, fiddle, mandolin, Dobro and pedal steel we were reminded of bands such as Granfaloon Bus, Hazeldine and even Whiskeytown who were blazing trails just before the turn of the century (writing it that way does make it seem a long time ago). Anyway, this isn’t a “country” album by any stretch of the imagination but it surely does qualify as Americana as it bops and weaves along with some mighty playing on show, the songs sometimes dusty, sometimes cold, several of them squirreling right into the brain with Random Stance the best example. A slow brooding number with grumbling guitars over gently rumbling percussion it slowly drifts from the speakers with Andrew Sigworth’s vocals summoning up a cold and forbidding picture, it’s quite wonderful.
Glasgow’s Daniel Meade has made his reputation on the back of a series of impressive albums which reached into the hinterlands of American folk, country and rockabilly aided and abetted by names such as Old Crow Medicine Show and Diana Jones. When Was The Last Time is a different kettle of fish in many respects however as Meade delivers a set of songs that positively explode from the speakers with a full bodied rock sound full of clangourous guitars and driving rhythms. He’s been on tour for a while with Ocean Colour Scene (playing keyboards) and perhaps some of their stadium filling sounds have seeped into his soul while some folk will remember his days as the jangle meister guitar player (on Rickenbacker even) in The Ronelles.
Back in 2014 Blabber’n’smoke was very taken by Trent Miller’s 
Never mind the clocks going forward, the arrival of a new Dropkick album surely heralds that summer is a coming. Always a band of a sunny disposition, Dropkick are so popular in Spain these days that it’s surprising the disc doesn’t come with a tube of sun cream but it is being jointly released via Spanish label Pretty Olivia Records although it was recorded in the band’s Edinburgh studio.
It’s difficult to be objective about a record that, since its announcement a few months back, has had one panting in anticipation to hear the music inscribed in its groove. Hearing that Danny Wilson of 
With her Austin based band Heartless Bastards on a hiatus, Erika Wennerstrom allows her full bodied voice an outing on a solo debut that is the result of a period of introspective soul searching, sparked off by a hallucinogenic experience in South America. She’s taken her time in crafting these nine songs which alternate from scorching rockers to more laid back country tinged songs with all of them relating to her self confessed anxieties and what she sees as a sort of spiritual and physical recovery from years on the road. Having said all that the album is a buoyant affair for the most part despite lyrics which can be dark such as, “I crack so deep, cracks that went right down to the bone,” and, “I’m searching for a place to feel like home, a place where I could breathe.”