Tag: Les Paul

You Gotta Hear This: New Music From Charlie Worsham, Maya de Vitry, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

New Music Friday is here! Our final Friday of April finds our roundup sharing excellent country, folk, and Americana. You Gotta Hear This.

To start, Los Angeles based neo-folk artist Malena Cadiz has released a very cool track, “Smoke Rings.” It’s a Les Paul cover recorded on the original Les Paul recording console. Music nerds will get the importance of the first-ever multi-tracking console and how apropos the song selection is, too, with Cadiz offering her own rendition of a song by Paul and Mary Ford. It’s jazzy and lazy – deliciously relaxed. Also based in LA, Dominique and the Diamonds launch a vibing and glittery honky-tonkin’ song, “I Don’t Mind,” to announce their upcoming album Honky Tonk Queen. It evokes California in a sonic package that shines like it’s covered edge-to-edge in sequins, pulled forward by Dominique Gomez’s lush voice.

Earlier this week, Irish artist Glen Hansard released a gorgeous live video for “Don’t Settle,” the title track for his new album out today, Don+t Settle – Transmissions East. Hansard and his ensemble perform the impassioned song in the round, surrounding each other and surrounded by their audience and a circle of shadows. It’s dramatic and compelling. Out in the sunshine, singer-songwriter Maya de Vitry announces her new upcoming album with a fresh song, “Confidence of the Sun.” Written in the warm and soft sunlight of the Texas Hill Country, the track showcases de Vitry’s penchant for finding redemption in herself, in breaking old habits, and in being present – within music and without – to do so. It’s a lovely harbinger for what’s to come.

Texan Jacob McCoy shares a new song with us today, as well. “All Our Days” is rich with deeply stacked vocal tracks and a country-meets-indie twang. One of the last songs written for his EP, Deep Deep Water, it’s also one of the singer-songwriter’s favorite tracks he’s written to date. His EP is out everywhere today. To round us out and finish us off, our old pal Charlie Worsham – country’s modern renaissance man – returns with a new single, “Grass,” out now. It’s a tribute to his favorite pastime (mowing), his favorite surface for walking barefoot, and his rowdy 20s (IYKYK). With a heaping helping of the humor he’s often known for, “Grass” is a summer anthem perfect for farmers tans and coming in the house smelling like a fresh-trimmed lawn. As Worsham performs at Stagecoach this weekend, we’ll be cheering him on and enjoying “Grass” right here on BGS.

There’s so much to enjoy below. Get listenin’, because You Gotta Hear This:

Malena Cadiz, “Smoke Rings”

Artist: Malena Cadiz
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “Smoke Rings”
Release Date: April 20, 2026
Label: Sad Mall

In Their Words: “A few months back, an old friend from NYC, Tom Camuso, reached out that he was in LA working on an exciting new project. Tom, who’s worked with Lenny Kravitz, Blondie, and Steve Earle, was in charge of refurbishing the original Les Paul recording console. For music nerds this is HUGE. Les Paul created the very first multi-tracking console in 1957 and it now has a new home in the historic United Studios in LA.

“He invited my band and I to track a few songs on the console to test the gear – this was the first time anyone had recorded on this machine since it had been put in storage decades ago. We were obviously over the moon to be invited and decided the first track recorded on Les Paul’s console after all these years should be a Les Paul song. We chose to do a version of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘Smoke Rings.’ I’ve loved this song forever for its dreamy, whimsical quality and Mary Ford’s gorgeous performance.

“My buds Jason A. Roberts (Norah Jones, Spoon, Bedouine), Leeann Skoda (Noah Cyrus), and Aaron Stern (Curtis Harding) came into the studio with me and I do not exaggerate when I say it was a semi-spiritual experience to get to record in this legendary space – they even got to play Les’s original guitars for the recording.” – Malena Cadiz

Maya de Vitry, “Confidence of the Sun”

Artist: Maya de Vitry
Hometown: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Song: “Confidence of the Sun”
Album: All My Faith
Release Date: May 1, 2026 (single); July 24, 2026 (album)
Label: Mad Maker Studio

In Their Words: “Over the years, I have shed what feels like many skins. When I wrote the first lines of this song, ‘It took me a long time to recognize peace as a place I belong,’ it felt healing just to sing it and own that truth. It’s taken years for me to begin to rewire some painful patterns, some deep grooves of self-doubt and self-sabotage. For anyone who has ever been through periods of interpersonal chaos, times of loud endings and quiet beginnings, an era of coming back to honesty in your body and spirit after going through the motions – it can be hard to actually see and feel and appreciate in your bones just how far we’ve come, you know?

“I wrote this song in the unapologetically bright-yet-soft sunlight of the Texas Hill Country, in spring, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch & Studio. I received a gift of attending a writing residency there, and it allowed me the space and time to slow down and listen to my own heart. I love this arrangement so much, the way it feels like home for me to rest my vocals in Dom Billett’s drum groove, the way the band rises and falls in energy together because this all happened in one whole live take, and the comfort and camaraderie of singing in unison with Shelby Means and Joel Timmons before we split into some joyous three-part harmony towards the end of the song.” – Maya de Vitry

Track Credits:
Maya de Vitry – Vocals, acoustic guitar
Shelby Means – Harmony vocals
Joel Timmons – Harmony vocals
Jo Schornikow – Keys
Ethan Ballinger – Electric guitar
Spencer Cullum – Pedal steel
Ethan Jodziewicz – Fretless electric bass
Dom Billett – Drums

Dominique and the Diamonds, “I Don’t Mind”

Artist: Dominique and the Diamonds
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “I Don’t Mind”
Album: Honky Tonk Queen
Release Date: April 24, 2026 (single); June 26, 2026 (album)

In Their Words: “Before moving to LA, I lived in a small farm town on the coast of Northern California. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to escape a dangerous relationship I was in. I was heartbroken for having to leave the town, not so much the relationship itself. I had plans of making it back one day and settling down, but when I found out my ex had planted roots out there, I knew it wouldn’t be safe for me to go back. I felt like he took a dream of mine away from me. I wanted this song to sound like that coastal town I was living in; a song that could transport you to that same beach where the sea touches the redwoods of Muir Woods. It might seem contrary for the song’s title to be ‘I Don’t Mind,’ but it’s how I feel about everything now. Moving to LA was the best decision of my life and unfortunately I don’t think I would have ended up here if I hadn’t experienced all of those terrible things up north. There would be no Dominique and the Diamonds, this incredible, dreamlike life that I live now because of this project would have never existed. So in the end, I don’t mind that my ex took my old dream away from me. This is exactly where I was meant to be.” – Dominique Gomez

Track Credits:
Dominique Gomez – Vocals, acoustic guitar
Hamilton Boyce – BGVs, bass
Tyler English – Pedal steel
Craig Jacobs – Drums
Glenn Brigman – Piano, producer
Dominique and the Diamonds – Producer

Glen Hansard, “Don’t Settle”

Artist: Glen Hansard
Hometown: Dublin, Ireland
Song: “Don’t Settle”
Album: Don+t Settle – Transmissions East
Release Date: April 21, 2026 (video); April 24, 2025 (album)
Label: Plateau/Secretly Distribution

In Their Words: “‘Don’t Settle’ is a song I wrote to a younger version of myself, the song came quite fast. A kind of roadmap of dos and don’ts for the sometimes treacherous tightrope that is one’s life in music. Stay the road, know your north. Listen only to your own heart and gut. Your road is your road. You’ll know the signs. Don’t deviate. And when you do, deviate completely. Don’t settle for less than you envisioned.” – Glen Hansard

Video Credits:
Frank Machel – Director, editor
Markus Mörtz – Producer, editor
Sara Kelly-Husain – Documentary, unit manager
Vincent Chmiel – Documentary
Martin Ullrich – DOP
Eric Poß – Camera
Armin Riedel – Camera
Stephan Bodner – Technical assistance, camera

Jacob McCoy, “All Our Days”

Artist: Jacob McCoy
Hometown: Amarillo, Texas
Song: “All Our Days”
Album: Deep Deep Water (EP)
Release Date: April 24, 2026

In Their Words: “‘All Our Days’ was one of the last songs written for the EP, and to date is one of my favorite songs I’ve written. I wrote it with friend and fiddle player Coral Bradshaw just a few weeks prior to recording. Something about it contains this seasoned, hard-earned romantic intimacy that just immediately drew me in like a lot of old country songs do. The song moves through all of the seasons of a long love – summer’s ease, winter’s frozen hope, and the slow return of spring – before landing somewhere that feels genuinely hard-won.

“Sam and I cut it on the first day of recording in his small above-garage studio in Nashville and it came together very organically. Syncopated fingerstyle guitar provides the foundation for the entire song and almost immediately you become immersed in intimate harmonies, with a waltzing bass line and support from an upright piano that provides some forward motion. For the interludes, I ended up playing my mother-in-law’s old cheap classical [guitar] from the ’70s that almost gave it a Willie Nelson feel, which given that he was always playing somewhere in the background growing up, I absolutely love. It might be my favorite musical moment on the entire project.” – Jacob McCoy

Track Credits:
Jacob McCoy – Vocals, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, bass
Sam Westhoff – Upright piano, producer

Charlie Worsham, “Grass”

Artist: Charlie Worsham
Hometown: Grenada, Mississippi
Song: “Grass”
Release Date: April 24, 2026

In Their Words: “‘Grass’ is an ode to my favorite surface to walk on barefoot, my favorite domestic pastime (mowing), and maybe a wink to a certain favorite pastime of my 20s, IYKYK…

“More than that, ‘Grass’ represents the blend of blues and bluegrass influences that raised me. I play that song and it takes me back to drinking from the water hose, attending my first MerleFest, walking out to the lawn seats at amphitheaters across the country, whether I was playing the show that night or catching a show with my friends.

“Some people like sand. Some people like snow. Some people like the concrete, where ain’t nothing grows. But I’d rather be… sweatin’ all summer on a John Deere stacking up cash cash cash…” – Charlie Worsham

Photo Credit: Charlie Worsham by PJ Brown; Maya de Vitry by Ethan Jodziewicz.

LISTEN: Luke LeBlanc, “All My Love”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Luke LeBlanc
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “All My Love”
Album: Better Now EP
Release Date: January 12, 2021

In Their Words: “‘All My Love’ came about while I was scrolling through some year-old voice memos on my phone. It was one of those song ideas that I recorded quickly in the moment and then left alone for a while and almost forgot. The lyrics came pretty quickly, but musically it took awhile to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I’m happy with how it turned out; it starts small and builds consistently the whole way through. All the fingerpicking is done on a Les Paul electric which gives you the option to really highlight certain notes louder than others while you’re playing.” — Luke LeBlanc

Photo credit: Mark Walentiny

LISTEN: Justin Farren, “Fixer Upper”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Justin Farren
Hometown: Sacramento, California
Song: “Fixer Upper”
Album: Pretty Free
Release Date: October 23, 2020

In Their Words: “A reflection on the experience of building the home I currently live in with my wife and daughter. With no previous experience, we broke ground in 2004 and finished construction in late 2007. As the financial market collapsed, our janky new home was initially appraised at a value less than the cost of the materials it took to build it, let alone the three years of exhaustive labor. I felt dumb. 🙂 On the whole album, I used the only acoustic guitar I’ve ever owned. It’s a cheap Simon & Patrick I bought when I was a teenager. The electric guitar is a Les Paul Standard that a friend left at my house 12 years ago. I’m not much of a guitar nerd. I feel like they’re all pretty similar. I took an acoustic approach on this song because it’s about building a home. So a natural ‘wooden’ sound seemed right.” — Justin Farren

Photo credit: Wes Davis

Merle Travis: The Urban Hillbilly Guitar Hero

Posted on by Editor

Welcome back to In Memoriam, a monthly series that chronicles Americana legends. So often, one giant is memorialized in their field while the others are displaced to historical footnotes. In Memoriam will spotlight influential musicians that are fading from the collective conscious and commemorate them appropriately. This month, Merle Travis.

Merle Travis is one of the greatest country musicians of all time. His renown does not match his influence. Born in rural Kentucky, Travis overcame nearly insurmountable poverty and went on to become one of the most sought-after and revered guitar pickers of all time. He wrote many of country music’s most enduring classics. His guitar design innovations are legendary. Yet, he’s often only remembered as a footnote to the Chet Atkins story.

Travis was born in 1917 in Roseburg, KY. His family were hard luck coal miners and his early life inspired some of his most well-known songs — “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” both chronicle the lives of Kentucky coal miners. At 18, Travis won a talent contest in nearby Indiana that launched his life as a professional musician. He played guitar in the Georgia Wildcats before settling in Cincinnati. There, he performed on WLW radio from 1938 until 1943. Chet Atkins first heard Travis on WLW in 1939 and was inspired to adapt his fingerpicking techniques.

Merle Travis first flirted with national fame after settling in Los Angeles in 1943. Los Angeles in the 1940s was one of the largest country music communities in the U.S. — Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and Gene Autry were some of Los Angeles's biggest stars. Thousands of the country’s best honky-tonkers convened on the bourgeoning metropolis. In this throng of urban hillbillies, Travis shined bright. Early on, megastar Tex Ritter took the young Travis under his wing. When the Musicians' Union kept Travis from steady work, Ritter hired him for a tour. When the Union put the kibosh on the tour, Ritter gave him $100. The two collaborated for the rest of their lives. Many of Ritter’s 1940s and '50s albums feature Merle.

[Photo credit: Cliff / CC BY-NC.]

Travis also had luck with television. Through this brand new medium, he found steady work playing for six hours a day five days a week on CBS — an unheard of feat by today’s standards. He also made time to front his own bands and act in B-movies. He finally signed a record deal with Capitol in 1946. It was a fruitful period in Merle’s often tumultuous life. His name was not on the marquees, but he was making a lot of money.

Travis cast a long shadow because he was a triple threat: a peerless guitar player, a brilliant songwriter, and an innovative guitar designer.

In fact, Merle Travis redefined country guitar. His trademark picking pattern was based on a Western Kentucky regional style that developed in the early 20th Century. It incorporated a syncopated bass pattern plucked with the thumb on the first and third count while the index and middle fingers played the melody on the higher strings. It created a huge sound, and mimicked the rhythm and feel of a full band. The technique is now known as Travis picking and it is instantly recognizable.

Like all great players, Merle sought out great musicians in other genres. He incorporated elements of ragtime and jazz into his music — the preeminent bluesman Blind Blake also influenced him. Artists like Chet Atkins have expanded on Travis’s techniques, but none were as groundbreaking. It is a timeless and enduring approach to the guitar that will never stale.

Merle Travis signed with the young Capitol Records in 1946 and had a string of self-penned hits. He tackled the topic of displaced veterans in “No Vacancy,” even while he found success with novelty songs like “Divorce Me COD” and “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed.” In a strange twist, most of his own hits during this period did not showcase his sought-after guitar skills. Instead, the recordings highlighted his smooth vocals. In 1947, he released Folk Songs of the Hills. At the time, it was an anomaly in his catalog. It flopped, but has aged well. Merle’s most enduring hits — “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” — come from this Kentucky-inspired folk album. Later in life, he reflected on his Capitol records and said, “I had a streak of good luck, but never took recording seriously. All of my records sounded very much alike. I just had fun making them.” You'd be hard pressed to find anyone that agrees.

[Photo credit: Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC.]

Though it is an oft-disputed fact, history indicates that Merle Travis designed the first solid body guitar. In 1947, he met Paul Bigsby who is now known for his whammy bar contributions. At the time, he was a motorcycle machinist. Travis, Bigsby, Leo Fender, and Les Paul all drank together. (All four are often credited with inventing the solid body guitar.) In 1947, Bigsby built a steel guitar for a friend, and it impressed Travis. He fell in love with the sustain. He wondered why his hollow body guitar didn’t have the same sound. “I came to the conclusion it was all because the steel guitar was solid,” Travis later wrote. “Another pet peeve of mine was changing strings on a guitar. When I lay my guitar down in my lap to change strings, the ones that were on the bottom are on the wrong side. They're awkward to change. I wondered why not put all he pegs on one side.” Travis sketched out a guitar for Bigsby, who went to work on it. It is now cited by most historians as the first solid body guitar. Bigsby built a handful of other guitars, but they are rare and now sell for upwards of $40,000. When Bigsby’s guitar tail pieces took off, he couldn’t handle the workload. When an order came in, he farmed out the work to his good friend Leo Fender. Although Travis’s claims were often doubted, Fender’s former vice president and the MusicMan amp creator Forrest White confirmed the story with Rolling Stone. Merle Travis beat both Les Paul and Leo Fender to the punch.

There are two reasons Merle Travis isn’t a household name. First, he always followed the money instead of the fame. He focused on steady work and playing on other artists' recordings, instead of on his material. The second reason is his personal life: In the 1950s, his drinking caught up with him. He was unreliable as a sideman and incapable of fronting his own band. He was arrested countless times for drunk driving on his motorcycle. In 1956, he pistol whipped his then-wife and held her hostage. His best friend Joe Maphis called the cops, and there was a standoff at the Travis house. It appears charges were never filed, but it was a horrendous stain on an already tarnished career. He managed to scrape by in the 1950s with a small part in the film From Here to Eternity and on the hype of Ernie Ford’s successful version of “Sixteen Tons.” His good friend Hank Thompson also kept him busy in the studio, although not on the road. The 60s didn’t look much better. Travis kicked them off with a narcotics arrest. Country radio and fandom all but forgot him by 1965.

Luckily, in 1968, Merle moved to Nashville at the behest of Chet Atkins, and his luck began to change. Travis and Atkins recorded an album together — The Atkins-Travis Travelling Show — that won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. Travis quit drinking and began recording again in earnest. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band even featured him on their ground-breaking album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, introducing him to another generation of traditional and New Grass pickers. He signed with CHD records in 1976 and his most prolific studio years followed. He was up for his second Grammy in 1983 when he died of a massive heart attack. By all accounts, he died a happy man, having overcome his struggles.

Although Merle Travis’s commercial success never matched his influence, he left an indelible mark on country music. You can hear it coming through Chet Atkins in the Nashville Sound of the '60s. His imprint is in Scotty Moore’s biting solos on Elvis Presley’s records. His clear tone is in George Harrison’s weeping guitar. Perhaps the most fitting homage to such a profound musician is that two other country music greats, Merle Watson and Glen Travis Campbell, were named in his honor. You may not know the name Merle Travis, but all your favorite musicians do.

Lede photo credit: Michael Ochs