What’s the time limit on second chances? Don Bryant is learning that it really can take a lifetime, or at least a few decades. Since the 1960s, the Hi Records songwriter has been putting pen to paper for other people’s voices. Label owner Willie Mitchell recognized his talent and tapped Bryant to help keep churning out…
Jessi Colter’s musical legacy has long been a balancing act between “the outlaw” and “the lady,” but there’s another side -- a third -- that informed her identity in even greater measure than those two descriptors. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister mother -- that’s right, mother -- Colter (whose birth name is Mirriam Johnson)…
In 1959, John Cohen went searching for something. Were you to ask him at the time, before he headed south toward Kentucky from New York by way of bus, he might’ve responded that it had to do with a sound. But underneath that sonic exploration lay an interest in weightier connections beyond what he’d heard pour…
Singer and incontrovertible soul man Lee Fields can’t help but emanate positivity. It’s not the annoying kind, the sickeningly sweet -- almost naïve -- approach to life that willfully ignores the world’s more deleterious moments in order to pretend everything’s hunky dory. Fields’ positivity exhibits a greater degree of realism. It’s a choice to recognize…
In late 2015, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon received the kind of news capable of derailing any person, let alone a creative individual with lots left to say and the imagined time left to say it. Doctors found a lump in his lung and wanted to send him for a biopsy, but the discovery fell…
