FolkBlog

Al Petteway and Amy White are this week’s featured artists. Al is a phenomenal guitarist, who blends Celtic and traditional folk guitar influences in a masterful way, and wife Amy is a multi-instrumentalist who also sings. Their brand new CD, Acoustic Journey, celebrates their last ten years of making music with some new tracks, some tracks from their previous work, and some previously recorded tracks re-recorded in new arrangements.

Other New Adds

Irish accordionist extraordinaire Sharon Shannon has a new CD out, Libertango, with collaborations from Sinead O’Connor and some other notable guest artists. Some very nice instrumentals, and the tracks with Sinead O’Connor are also quite good.

I really like the new Flogging Molly disk, Within a Mile of Home. There’s just something about high energy CeltPunk. “Factory Girls”, with guest Lucinda Williams on vocals, is the highlight of the CD for me, primarily because I can play it and not feel like I’m going out on a limb - it fits my format perfectly, which you can’t always say for Flogging Molly tunes.

Tracy Grammar has a solo CD out, The Verdant Mile, full of well-chosen cover songs and a couple originals, including a fiddle tune where Tracy gets to show off her fiddle prowess. The cover of Carole King’s “I Wasn’t Born to Follow” is particularly fine, as is the title track, an original.

Have I mentioned how great the new Mavis Staples and Buddy Miller disks are? I see that I have. Well, their greatness has not changed a whit over the last week. Go out and buy both of them.

Anais Mitchell is a really promising young singer/songwriter. Her CD, Hymns for the Exiled is well worth tracking down. I suspect that I will be playing the heck out of it for months to come. It’s on Waterbug records.

Appleseed Records has re-issued John Wesley Harding’s debut live CD, It Happened One Night, as part of a two-disk set with some unreleased studio recordings from about the same time, called in typical JWH tongue-in-cheek fashion, It Never Happened At All. Look in this space for John Wesley Harding to be the featured artist next week after I’ve had the chance to process these CDs. Any excuse to feature one of my favorite singer/songwriters is good enough for me.