VMP Magazine

If you’re a blues or R&B fan, it’s likely that you’ve heard Katie Webster’s swampy boogie-woogie without knowing it. There she is playing piano and singing along with Otis Redding on In Person at the Whisky A Go Go. There she is hammering the keys for Lightnin’ Slim. There she is on Slim Harpo singles from the late ’50s. Webster’s story is like 20 Feet from Stardom in miniature: Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, she was always on the periphery, just out of the heat of the spotlight, supporting stars as they hit the big time.

The idea of a career being held up, of being stuck in a Sliding Doors moment where an alternate universe breaks in an alternate way, is one of the most alluring and enduring in all of music lore. It’s what the cratedigger economy is built on: Promise unrecognized, grooves underappreciated, talent overlooked. It’s a story that brings out the romantic in all of us; by listening to an artist once shelved and consigned to the dustbins of history, we are correcting wrongs and righting evils, Captain America giving Red Skull a fist of fury to the domepiece.

The rules of being a country music star used to be simple: you sing the songs the label picks for you, you show up to sing at the Opry when the label tells you to, and you’ll be off on a nice little singing career. This factory-esque system flourished — with a couple of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash shaped exceptions — from the first time a poor southerner with mandolin skills walked into a recording booth.

But rock music, particularly the Beatles and Dylan, had showed a generation of performers in every genre that it was possible to choose what you sing, and furthermore, be the one who writes it. You could be a star by following your own gut and doing what you wanted to do not only in the bars of Nashville, but in the recording studio too.

That’s how outlaw country was born; a whole wave of young stars — who liked the weed those hippies from the coasts were smoking — decided to take agency over their own careers and make the music they wanted to make, some of them even in a major label system. The genre title wasn’t clever: a lot of the songs were about how they saw themselves as outlaws, smoking dope and pillaging the American south on their tours.

Despite all odds, outlaw country has become an ensconced genre conceit in country music. Anytime a country singer does an album that doesn’t sound like mainstream country, it gets labeled as outlaw country. That doesn’t mean that it’s not outlaw country; it’s just hard to imagine Waylon Jennings trying to make an album that sounds like 1933 in 1973 like the people labeled outlaw country in 2016 are making albums that sound like 1976. That said, there are some modern albums that ascend the outlaw country throne. Doing what you consider to be “true” is the only hallmark of a good outlaw country album, and these 10 are the most true.

In October and November, Vinyl Me, Please flew me to Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville to interview artists and writers for the fourth season of the Vinyl Me, Please Anthology Podcast, this one centered around Stax Records. When I was putting my list of artist requests together, there was one artist I wanted to talk to, but not just for what he could tell me about one of the records in our Stax Records box set (Hold On I'm Comin' in this case): David Porter.

When Stax Records closed up shop for good in the late ’70s, David Porter was the last captain steering the legendary soul music ship. After bankruptcy and a lack of national distribution forced the label to close in 1975, Porter was hired by Fantasy Records — which bought Stax from bankruptcy court — to run the label as an on-going concern. Porter was the perfect man for the job; with Isaac Hayes, he’d written songs, produced and A&R’d Sam & Dave records, and songs for basically all of Stax’s first wave. When Hayes became Stax’s biggest star of its second wave, Porter also had a woefully underrated run of solo records — Victim Of The Joke is one of the five best albums ever on Stax, in this writer’s opinion — but also became Stax’s de facto producer and in-house A&R, helming projects for everyone from the Emotions to the Bar-Kays. When Fantasy realized Porter intended to bring Stax back to its former glory, rather than plumb the Otis Redding catalog over and over, via releasing chart smashes from groups like the Bar-Kays, Fantasy more or less closed the book on Stax being a current label. 

The most dangerous thing in country music is an artist with nothing to lose. Someone who doesn’t need the Music City Machinery to rev behind them, doesn’t need the co-signs from artists from the ’90s, doesn’t need the fame, fortune and everything that goes with it to feel fulfilled. Doesn’t need to gladhand the radio programmers, doesn’t need to go to every industry party and shmooze like it’s their job. What the outlaws like Waylon, Kris and Willie represented was not so much a genre shift, but a spiritual one: When the suits could no longer tell Waylon his albums couldn’t be songs about how hungover and worn out he was, or that Willie couldn’t make an album of standards, it created an entire vortex for artists to ride on through, following their own muse with nothing to lose.  

Before the phrase was used for a video game, before it became slightly ironic to be super good at your instrument, before you knew what every guitarist ate for breakfast on Instagram, before Lil Wayne made a “rock” album, we used to have Guitar Heroes. Men — and a few women — who stalked the highways of the world slinging their six strings up and down the road, who could be identified by a single riff, and sometimes by a single name. Clapton. The Three Kings. Muddy. Prince. Hendrix. Robert. Van Halen. 

“All alone, all the way

On your own, who’s to say

That you’ve thrown it away for a song”

— Kris Kristofferson, “Breakdown (A Long Way From Home)” 

“If they liked a mangy freak maybe they would love a mangy cowboy as well.” 

—  Willie Nelson

Let’s start with the scream. We tend to define our singers by how “great” their voice is, how deftly they can ascend and descend major and minor scales, and how they can turn up and turn down the emotion inherent in their voices. But when considering Wilson Pickett, it begins and ends with his scream. He could take you on a journey, he could butter you up, he could make you feel things in your vital organs, but you don’t get a nickname like “Wicked Pickett” because you’re a crooner. His scream was there when he joined the early soul group the Falcons. It was there within the first three words of his breakthrough single, “In the Midnight Hour.” It was there when he was singing about his telephone number (“634-5789”), a variety of dance crazes (“Land of 1000 Dances”), and the supremacy of the American automobile and American women (“Mustang Sally”). 

When Berry Gordy — who had his eyes set on TV and movie domination, after ruling over the pop charts like Genghis Khan, his sub-labels standing in for the Khan’s sons — moved the Motown operation from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972, he left a considerable vacuum. What was once music’s inarguable third (or fourth) coast, depending on where you put Nashville, became what it was before Gordy: A city of musicians without a mainline to the mainstream. But a whole generation of performers from the same neighborhoods — and even the same apartment buildings — as the Supremes, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye grew up knowing that the distance between 8 Mile Road and the pop charts was not as far as kids growing up in Cleveland, Minneapolis or Omaha might have thought. That desire and ambition didn’t evaporate overnight, but with Motown leaving, there were record industry veterans (singers, studio engineers, producers, songwriters) who were suddenly left without steady work, and had to build their own things. This ranged from jazz collectives like Tribe Records to producers like Don Davis and Sir Mack Rice, who linked up with Stax Organization in Memphis to provide a non-Memphis pipeline of new artists to Motown’s main rival.

If you’re sentient and been to a multiplex, you’ve noticed a reliable movie trope happening: since Ray won Jamie Foxx an Oscar, every year has seen a smattering of biopics on musicians. Just this year saw films on Nina Simone, Miles Davis (which I actually loved), Hank Williams (which I hated), Chet Baker, and that time Elvis met Nixon. Next year promises a threatened Tupac biopic, a Def Jam records biopic, Morrissey, and Death Row Records biopic.

Now, some of these movies might be enjoyable. But odds are most of them will suck, and most of them will be an insult to you, the people that made them, and the artist whose life they’re based on. And more importantly, none of them will ever stack up to a biopic of a fictional folk singer in New York in the early ‘60s, in a Coen Brothers movie hardly anyone saw. I’m talking of course, about Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 film starring Oscar “Yeah, I’m in Star Wars and X-Men” Isaac in the title role. The film is far and away the best, and realest movie, about being a working musician ever made. It’s better than any biopic you’ve ever seen.

Each week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is The Long Way, The Slow Way, the debut LP from Camp Trash.

Thirteen seconds that are as unpretentious as they are indelible: Alan Eugene Jackson, on a sunny Georgia afternoon, in ripped blue jeans, a cowboy hat and a life jacket with a distinctly ’90s color palette, waterskiing with a giant, goofy smile on his face. Despite being the third single from his third LP, the video for “Chattahoochee” was, for most of America, the introduction to Jackson’s charms. It was everywhere in 1993, and it’s brutally efficient in its presentation. Alan Jackson was not a pretty boy of pop country in a cut tank top; he was not a wannabe cowboy carpetbagging in country. He was a regular dude who knew what it was like to hit the river in jeans, and who could fix a jetski in a pinch. One of those guys who you’ve never seen without a hat, their hairline a mystery to everyone but their closest familiars. 

The best Brad Paisley songs are like the best Hallmark cards you’ve ever received. They are poignant, they might make you chuckle, or they might even blindside you and make your eyes misty. They speak to specific moments in time, in a way that is (almost) never saccharine or exploitative. That moment when you’re looking at your family, wondering where time went. That moment when you remember your life’s goals used to be as simple as securing a used Honda. That beer-induced contemplation of all the different ways your life might have turned. When you quietly realize that your love life is a tumultuous plane ride at risk of crashing.

Every week we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s soundtrack for The Northman. 

It’s the kind of fact you discover via a late night TikTok scroll, or one of those vacuous #MusicFacts Twitter accounts that remind you that, on this date, the Beatles recorded “I Am the Walrus.” In a previous generation, it’d been conveyed via VH1’s Pop-Up Video. But the fact remains intriguing and inconceivable in any era: In 1994 and 1995: the country singer John Michael Montgomery and the R&B/pop group All-4-One had simultaneous cross-chart Billboard hits with the same two songs, “I Swear” and “I Can Love You Like That.” While previous generations of chart gamery included semi-simultaneous covers — look to the album cuts of every Motown record until What’s Going On, especially — no one had ever hit upon the ingenious, and possibly amoral, technique of taking two invincible ballads, and tweaking the musical formula to include more drums (All-4-One) or more twang (JMM). This was not a cover of “All Along the Watchtower” by an artist played on the same radio station, coming mere months after the original; this was a concerted effort by the A&R staff at Atlantic Records to seed the same song to two different genres, to see if both could become hits. 

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is the major-label debut from country singer Zach Bryan, American Heartbreak.

Here is Phineas Newborn Jr. on a muggy Memphis day in July, 2021. Buried at plot C-399 B at the Memphis National Cemetery, he’s laid there since his death on May 26, 1989 after a growth was found on his lungs. He served in Korea in his early 20s, virtually the only time in his life when he was not supported by his fingers twinkling a piano, but service time that guaranteed him a spot in the National Cemetery, hidden on Memphis’ north side. He’s buried between two World War II vets, one named — and this is true — George Washington, who died a month before Newborn Jr. 

It was sometime during the final chorus of “October, First Account,” when Jemina Pearl and Jonas Stein were singing together over a song that is somehow more powerful live than it is on record, that I realized I was crying. Not some minor water-in-my-eyes moment, but like, full-on waterworks. Something about the odds of being there, 1,100 miles from where I live, in a single-seat row at the back of the Tabernacle in Atlanta, seeing a band I love do one of my favorite songs ever hit me in the solar plexus. I was soaking through my KN95, as 16 years of listening to a song that gave me incredible catharsis at too many emotional moments in my life to recount here in full came rushing into the present. The song ended, I clapped and yelled, and didn’t stop crying until the band finished playing “Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle” some minutes later. I didn’t expect to ugly cry during a set from the aughts’ best punk band, but there I was, crying a similar volume to the cans of Liquid Death available at every bar in the Tabernacle. 

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is A Beautiful Time, the new album from country music legend Willie Nelson. 

Since the first person took two Edison cylinders home to their log cabin and put them in the top shelf of their chifferobe, record organization has been a logistical problem for everyone who collects records. Once you seriously start collecting a musical medium — be that MP3s even — how to organize that musical medium in a way that you can find that right song and record at the right time becomes a full time job (well, at least part time, weekends only).

But there’s very little practical advice on how to organize your records. Each record collector is treated as an island: you figure out how to organize your records on your own, without any guidance. So I’m here to help: I’ve assembled 10 different ways to organize your records, and laid out why a person would choose to organize their records that way, and followed that up with which people will find that method most amenable.

When he emerged as a child prodigy on the steel guitar, being asked to join the Grand Ole Opry as a teen, it was a certain bet that Doug Sahm would make a career in country music. What no one would have predicted was how many different aliases Sahm would take over the course of his 40-year career in the genre. So, to honor our VMP Country Record of the Month for April 2022, here’s a primer on all the different aliases and bands Sahm fronted over the years. 

Lightnin’ Hopkins, the pride of Centerville, Texas, was never a performer that fit neatly into a historical narrative. For at least 20 years, he was a guitar slinger who hardly played outside of the bars in Houston’s historic Third Ward neighborhood. He was too young and inexperienced to have been swept up in the race records boom of the ’30s at Paramount Records along with Skip James and Robert Johnson, and too old to have been part of the Vanguard Records boom of the late ’60s alongside Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. But that didn’t mean he was working in complete obscurity: As noted in Alan Govenar’s comprehensive Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues, Hopkins is likely the most recorded blues musician of all time. He was never pinned down by a record label and would record for any outfit who would have him for the better part of 40 years. 

As far as country music origin stories go, it’s tough to beat Doug Sahm’s. A Texas wunderkind, he was already a semi-professional musician at age 11, playing fairs and hoedowns around the state. He was already a regular on Louisiana Hayride when he was pictured with Hank Williams before the elder star’s death in 1953. He’d just finished playing a set with Hank, slinging his too-big steel guitar, when, according to Texas Tornado: The Times & Music of Doug Sahm by Jan Reid and Shawn Sahm, someone had the idea to take the duo’s pic with Doug on Hank’s lap. It’s a kind of coronation country stars dream of, a torch-pass from the literal progenitor of popular country as we know it. But for his part, beyond the shows, all Sahm remembered was how bony Hank’s knee was. 

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is the new album from Australian cartoonist and musician Montero. It’s out now on Chapter Music.

Colter Wall’s Songs Of The Plains is one of the year’s best albums; raw, open and stunning, it announces the arrival of Wall as a force in folk and country. We’re selling a limited-edition version of the deluxe edition of Songs Of The Plains in our store right now, which you can grab here.

Recently we sent one of our writers to Indianapolis to catch up with Wall. You can read our interview with him about the album, the Internet, and growing up in Saskatchewan below.

This is the fourth year I’ve done this list for Vinyl Me, Please, and I always try to open these with an essay on The State Of Country Music, but this year feels too similar to last year for there to be too revealing: The main problem in country music this year, as it’s been forever, is that it’s extremely hard for people who are not white men to get their music on the radio or on the major labels that control so much of the country music business. There was a literal supergroup of country women formed this year in response to how hard it is to hear a woman on any hour-long block of country radio, and nothing changed. Someone in the country business also probably called Billboard to have Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” forcibly removed from the country charts, even when it was as clear as day that that song was a country song and after it was clear it was going straight to No. 1 (for more on how black artists have been written out of country music, read this.

Despite all the same old shit, this was an extremely good year for new country albums: A mix of young upstarts, old warriors, and supergroups all made great albums. Cutting my list down to 10 was extremely hard this year — which hasn’t always been the case in the past — but without further ado, here they are:

Thanks to last night’s Grammy tribute, his music finally coming to streaming services that don’t share a name with a Fiona Apple album — which it should be noted, Prince did NOT want to happen when he was alive — and his catalog getting sold off for the inevitable reissue campaign (which actually started last year), Prince is on every music fan’s mind. Well, he probably has been since before he died last year, but there’s never been a better time to be a Prince fan. The vault is being unlocked, and the music is becoming more available.

Which means the time has never been better to evaluate which of Prince’s albums are the most essential. He made 39 Prince albums in his lifetime, and wrote many more for other artists, and trying to determine which one of those are must owns for your record collection can be a challenge. So here’s the list of the 10 Best Prince Albums to Own on Vinyl, which serves as a survey of his career, and makes the tough calls on which ones you need to have in your life.

It’s a story that starts like most in our post-capitalist terrorscape: I needed more money.

In January, my wife turned 30, and without going too far into it, we both could really use an excuse to get away from it all. I hatched a plan: I’d surprise my wife with a trip to New Orleans — an American city we’d never been to — for an all expenses Dirty Thirty trip (we mostly went to restaurants and museums). It was a genius idea, and I had 5 months to plan it, but here was the question: How would I pay for it?

While I am paid well for my work here at VMP Midwest HQ — I have enough money to pay rent, buy food for myself and my dumb dog, pay off my considerable credit card debt (shout out to years working retail for $8.50 an hour) and my wife’s student debt — I don’t have much by way of disposable income (shout out to my wife for having us on monthly “allowances” to pay off that debt). While that commonly Millennial situation is successful in killing off Applebee’s, it left me with a conundrum. Being a music writer leaves you with very few transferable skills as far as “side hustles” go, and I needed to raise these funds in secret, which meant that I couldn’t drive for Lyft or Grubhub at night with our shared car. Then, it dawned on me: I’d determine which records in my 1,700+ record collection I could do without, and then sell them on Discogs, the online record marketplace juggernaut.

It’s that time of year again, when we all turn ourselves into sentient pretzels, tied up and consumed with what to buy the people in our lives to show them that we love them, care for them, tolerate them at work or got forced into buying something for them by our wives. I can’t help you if you’re trying to buy something for the Avatar obsessed weirdo who works in a cubicle two rows over, but I can help you find a gift for the Experienced Vinyl Collector in your life.

Experienced Vinyl Collectors™ are a hard group to shop for, because despite you knowing exactly what their hobbies are — vinyl records and uh, other vinyl-adjacent things — they think they have everything. It’s your job to find things they might not have thought of, or didn’t buy for themselves. I hope that these eight things fit that bill.

“With the possible exception of the Beatles, no band in the history of popular music, and certainly no African American act, has left a more substantial legacy on popular music than the Isley Brothers.” — Bob Gulla, ‘Icons of R&B and Soul’

Panda Bear’s Person Pitch is built upon a crucial mass of samples and influences, rendered like the mix of music banging around in Noah Lennox’s head in album form. Not only did Lennox thank an insane amount of artists in the liner notes, he also sampled a bunch of artists too. So, in order to understand Person Pitch’s robust sample material and how it was recontextualized into something new, here’s a list of the songs from Person Pitch, paired with the songs they sample.

In May, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive an exclusive reissue of Gospel Train, the 1956 studio LP from influential gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Cut directly to lacquer by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, pressed at QRP in Salinas, Kansas, and featuring Listening Notes from Gayle Wald, author of the definitive biography of Tharpe, this new edition is the defining reissue of Gospel Train.

You can read an excerpt of the Listening Notes booklet included with the album here, and sign up to receive it here.

Below, read why we picked Gospel Train and the details of our reissue.

In September, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Jujus / Alchemy of the Blues, the third album from poet/scholar/musician Sarah Webster Fabio. We worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways to replicate the packaging from 1976, and had the album remastered by the staff at the label. Read an excerpt from the Listening Notes here. You can sign up over here.

Below, you can learn why we picked the album, and everything that went into our reissue, from the package to the remastering.

The vision of Willie Nelson that exists in the popular imagination — the shoulder-length braided ponytail, the weed, the Outlaw on the fringes, the Zen leader of the Tao of Willie and, again, the weed — is not present on his, say, first 15 studio albums. Sure, Willie’s songwriting was strong from his debut on (the best, really), but look at that album cover. There Willie is on ...And Then I Wrote, looking less like the guy who’d change the sound, themes and mythology of country music and more like a nice young man who’d love to see you inside of a new Chrysler. Things loosen up on his third LP, Country Willie, but he’s still clean shaven, wearing bib overalls and looking like someone your square grandpa would listen to in 1965. On his eighth LP, Good Times, he’s playing golf; on the cover of his 10th, Both Sides Now, he’s wearing what looks like business casual; and it’s not until his 12th, Willie Nelson and Family, that you even get a hint that Willie isn’t like the ham’n’egger country singers who dominated the genre in the ’60s, guys who sang big-chested ballads and dressed like they were on their way to the supper club.

And it’s not until his 16th album, the one that brings us here today, that Outlaw Willie emerges: cocoon-like, ready to break every rule of country stardom. He was fed up, and done doing things like he had been told to do them, done playing by Nashville’s rules and done being forced into the Countrypolitan sound as dictated by his producers at RCA. He absconded to Austin, Texas, bro’d out with a new generation of country songwriters trying to get back to what’s real and pondered his next move. At 39, he considered retiring, saying to hell with it and heading off into the sunset.

What he’d do next would change country music forever, and help launch an entire movement. It’d make him a star, and into the Willie Nelson we all now know and love. And it started with Shotgun Willie.

The R&B we know of as R&B didn’t start out that way. The story of R&B as a unified sound starts in a variety of regional hubs—L.A., Miami, Memphis, Detroit and Chicago, among others—and those regional hubs’ labels and sound getting swallowed by major labels, and turned into one unified genre. There were benefits to both sides in this process; the regional hubs could watch stars like Sam and Dave and Otis Redding and the Temptations go from regional curios to mega stars, and the majors basically had their farm teams spread across the country.

New Orleans—always heralded as the birthplace of jazz—is often left out of the conversations of hubs for R&B music, but it boasted a couple powerhouse labels—Imperial Records and Minit Records—that made national stars out of Fats Domino, had Allen Toussaint in its roster of producers and songwriters, and in addition to making a star of Cher, had their own Queen of Soul: Irma Thomas, who went by the Soul Queen of New Orleans.

The 50 Best Record Stores In America is an essay series where we attempt to find the best record store in every state. These aren’t necessarily the record stores with the best prices or the deepest selection; you can use Yelp for that. Each record store featured has a story that goes beyond what’s on its shelves; these stores have history, foster a sense of community and mean something to the people who frequent them.

“I’ve never had a show — before or since — that went as seamlessly as that one at Carnegie Hall. And even though New York City isn’t exactly known for having much of a country fan base, the crowd that night was as receptive as any I’d ever experienced. I still wouldn’t live there if they gave me the whole damn town, but that night sure changed my mind about not wanting to play there.” — Buck Owens in Buck ’Em! The Autobiography of Buck Owens

“If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.” — Frank Sinatra, “New York, New York”

Every week we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is See You Next Time, the new album from Joshua Ray Walker, one of country’s best young stars.

At some point in the last century-and-a-half, some wiseacre wrote the best bon mot that’s ever been coined in relation to a performance venue when they answered the question “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” with one word: “Practice.” That one-liner symbolizes the importance of Carnegie Hall, a venue in midtown Manhattan commissioned by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to house orchestras he was fond of, in the American imagination. You didn’t get to play Carnegie because you were famous, or because your audience demanded it: You could only play Carnegie Hall if you were good.