The Highwaymen was a Country music supergroup comprising four of the genre’s biggest artists well known for their pioneering influence on the outlaw country subgenre: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Active between 1985 and 1995, these four artists recorded three major label albums as The Highwaymen: two on Columbia Records and one for Liberty Records. Their Columbia works produced three chart singles, including the Number One “Highwayman” in 1985.
We love these artists separate and we loved when they sang together, and we have dug up two great treasures.
First we have a concert shot at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum in 1990, In between the songs are short snippets of separate anecdotes the four share about each other. They have respect, love and admiration for one another. The music is superb, the audience receptive and the band a core of excellent musicians.
The Highwaymen Live 1990:
We also have found a terrific documentary, originally it was included as a bonus DVD on a release of the album The Road Goes On Forever. A good album by the way. It shows the Highwaymen in the studio and his has some great candid moments, it’s a gem.
This a very fine documentary profiling the life of Johnny Cash. There are quite a few films about Cash, this is one of the very best.
It is a major retrospective of Cash’s life, times and music. It features contributions from Rosanne Cash(daughter) and John Carter Cash (son), his longtime manager Lou Robin and many musicians including Little Richard, Cowboy Jack Clement, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Elvis Costello.
Johnny Cash was the son of a sharecropper from Arkansas, who sang folk, gospel and country songs to himself while picking cotton in the fields. In the 50s he signed to Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, the rest is great music history.
This is the centre-piece of an extensive Johnny Cash Night on BBC Four. A major retrospective of Cash’s life, times and music, it includes contributions from his daughter, Rosanne Cash, and son, John Carter Cash; his long-time manager, Lou Robin; and fellow musicians, including Little Richard, Cowboy Jack Clement, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Elvis Costello.
Cash was the son of a sharecropper from Kingsland, Arkansas, who sang folk, spiritual and country songs to himself while picking cotton in the fields. In the Fifties he signed to Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, scored his first hits and was part of the “Million Dollar Quartet” with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.
In the Sixties he created his famous Man In Black persona and became a huge country music star with hits such as Folsom Prison Blues, Ring Of Fire, I Walk The Line and A Boy Named Sue. At that time he was also torn between drug dependency, hell-raising and a powerful spirituality. Cash had long since established himself as a man of the people with his prison concerts, beginning with an incendiary performance in San Quentin.
He ended the decade by finally marrying June Carter, daughter of the legendary Carter family, launching his own national TV series from Nashville, duetting with Bob Dylan, befriending the Native American movement and opposing the war in Vietnam while playing concerts for the soldiers in the field.
Although plagued by ill-health, Cash reignited his career with a new, young audience in the Nineties, when he began to record with Def Jam’s producer, Rick Rubin.
Cash won numerous Grammys and other awards for his last studio album, 2003’s The Man Comes Around, and the extraordinary video for the Nine Inch Nails song, Hurt, which revealed Cash as a white-haired old man contemplating his mortality.
Cash died in September 2003 shortly after the retrospective Unearthed, a five CD-set of the acoustic performances with which he resurrected his career in the last decade of his life, and after losing his wife in June 2003.
– docuwiki.net
Jason Isbell does a tremendous live version of his song Stockholm on Letterman about a week ago (23 July).
Garden and Gun wrote:
“As his career has progressed, Isbell has garnered a collection of rabid fans, including David Letterman, who was turned on to him by fellow artist Patty Griffin. Since then Isbell has played Letterman’s show a number of times, and has flown out to Letterman’s Montana ranch to perform at his annual Fourth of July bash.”
I have finally seen Van Morrison in concert, and I’m going around with a big grin on my face. It was better than I could hope for. I had heard a lot about how his concerts could be hit or miss affairs, and I was a bit afraid that we would end up with a miss. We did not!
We jumped in the car at 9:30 in the morning on Friday 2 August and drove to Notodden, this took nearly 6 hours with some stops along the way (and a few hiccups in the traffic). We drove through fantastic mountain scenery and listened to Van’s music and had interesting discussions on his music (and life in general).
We put up the tent at the official Blues-camp, drank some wine/beer/whisky and headed over to the concert area.
Van Morrison had asked for James Hunter Six to be support act to his own show, they did a good job. They sound better live than on record, but the best ones always do.
Minute by Minute from their latest album, Minute by Minute was the high point for me, great singing and good fun!
Then there was a short wait until the main attraction would come on stage. The band came out and started Celtic Swing, Morrison joined them and the stage was set. This instrumental sounded tight and good, and the main man played some fine sax. The band consists of seasoned musicians and they played brilliantly through the concert.
I will not go through all the songs, but it was a good set, it was a great set. The last half of the concert was incredibly good. Van Morrison smiled and even told a joke (!): The horns were in the middle of a particular grandiose (even pretentious) part of I Can’t stop loving you when Van points his arm in their direction and declares, “The Bert Kaempfert Orchestra!”, then grins and says, ” almost like the real thing”. Funny guy!
James Hunter joined them on stage for two rousing renditions of Help me and Gloria. It was one of the best concerts I’ve seen this year.
Set list (I’ve marked my favorites with an * ):
1. Celtic Swing
2. Got to go back
3. Only a dream
4. Keep mediocrity at bay
5. Pagan Heart *
6. Baby Please don’t Go/Boogie Chillen/Rock Island Line
7. What am I living for
8. Playhouse
9. Born to sing *
10. Going down to Monte Carlo
11. Moondance
12. Brown Eyed Girl
13. Jackie Wilson Said
14. That’s Life
15. Whenever God Shines his light *
16. Can’t Stop Loving You *
17. Help Me * w/ James Hunter
18. Gloria * w/ James Hunter
Van Morrison told us we had been a fantastic audience, danced (yep) off the stage and the band finished an extended Gloria. It was fantastic!
We saw/heard Little Andrew (parts of it anyway) – didn’t do it for us, Beth Hart, well, one of our principles here at JV is not to write about things we don’t like, therefore I will not say anything about her performance. Late on Friday night we saw The Royal Southern Brotherhood, a band with great potential, a good group of musicians but their songs don’t match their skillful playing. A very promising band none the less!
We went down to our tent around two in the morning, and some fucker on a bus played bad trance music until five! Why do all the guys with the largest loudspeakers have the worst taste in music? I seriously considered throwing rocks at them around the time the power went out in the morning. Then came the rain, the worst downpour we have seen in quite a long time. First time camping in a tent in at least 15 years and all this! We woke up at around ten. 5 good hours of sleep 🙂
We saw Ida Jenshus and here incredible band before the drive home. I’ve said most of the fine things that has to be said about Jenshus and her band, and again they gave us a wonderful concert. They ended the show with a fantastic version of Neil Young’s Words (from Harvest). Then and there all the noise from those trance loving idiots and the bad weather from the night were forgotten. It had all been worth it.
Jerome John “Jerry” Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) is best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band The Grateful Dead.Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or “spokesman” of the group.
One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead from 1965 until 1995. Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders-Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known by many for his distinctive guitar playing and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” cover story.
Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jerry Garcia was best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, the rock band for which he served as de facto leader for 30 years, 1965-1995. Concurrently for much of that time, he also led his own Jerry Garcia Band (JGB), and he performed and recorded in a variety of configurations and a variety of styles, particularly styles of folk and country music, sometimes switching to banjo or pedal steel guitar for the purpose. But the Grateful Dead remained his primary musical outlet, and he performed thousands of concerts with them and appeared on dozens of their albums (many of them live recordings), 28 of which reached the Billboard chart during his lifetime, including the million-sellers Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty,Europe ’72, Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead, What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been: The Best of the Grateful Dead, and In the Dark, and another eight that went gold. – From Allmusic (William Ruhlmann)
Lagacy:
Garcia was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead in 1994.
In 2003, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Jerry Garcia 13th in their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
According to fellow Bay Area guitar player Henry Kaiser, Garcia is “the most recorded guitarist in history. With more than 2,200 Grateful Dead concerts, and 1,000 Jerry Garcia Band concerts captured on tape – as well as numerous studio sessions – there are about 15,000 hours of his guitar work preserved for the ages.”
Seattle rock band Soundgarden wrote and recorded the instrumental song “Jerry Garcia’s Finger”, dedicated to the singer, which was released as a b-side with their single “Pretty Noose”.
Jerry Garcia Band – I shall be released (fantastic version, great guitar playing!):
Album of the day – Keystone Companions – The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings:
