VMP Magazine

“I can’t think of two more dissimilar women than Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, and yet I hear they’re going to make a movie together,” wrote one would-be critic in a 1979 nationally syndicated Q&A column, summing up the views of plenty of skeptics when news broke that Parton would me making her Hollywood debut alongside Hanoi Jane herself. What could the activist-actress possibly have in common with the self-professed Backwoods Barbie?

It's hard to imagine a time when the music industry didn't know what to do with Dolly Parton — before she was instantly acknowledged as not just a self-evident musical genius, but a larger-than-life multimedia icon. But when a 19-year-old Dolly Rebecca Parton first signed to Monument Records in 1965, those men who thought they held the keys to her musical future were befuddled. 

“No, I am not for your amusement,” Dolly Parton says with a wink on one of Blue Smoke’s deeper album cuts, the frothy “Lover Du Jour.” Ostensibly a rejoinder to some woefully unserious paramour, the quip could offer a clue as to why the iconic singer recorded the album — her 42nd — in the first place: because she wanted to. 

The moment country music was born, it started dying — at least according to a particular substrate of purists. For decades, they have dug in their heels for fiddle, for mandolin, for harmonies. Every so often, they get a win, pulling the rope over to their side in the endless tug-of-war between country music that incorporates the pop trends of the day (for both creative and commercial reasons), and country music that prioritizes mining the music’s widely mythologized tradition.

All Dinah Washington wanted was the one thing she never got. Dubbed the Queen of the Blues and the Queen of the Jukeboxes — titles she used herself — Washington nevertheless resisted genre orthodoxy, and was clearly resentful whenever she was asked to explain or categorize her vast catalog. “You would mostly call me an all-’round singer,” she insisted with a patient smile when a Swedish TV host asked her whether she preferred to sing jazz or blues songs. “Haven’t made opera yet,” Washington quipped by way of conclusion, perhaps nodding to the hurdles facing Black women artists, while making clear that she could earn many a “Brava” at the Met, if given the opportunity.

“I can sing anything,” she told Jet magazine in a quote published posthumously. “Anything at all.”

Everything old is new again — at least in the case of acid jazz, the London-born fusion that came to define both a decade of U.K. dance music and the Sex and the City theme song. “I feel like I'm the next generation of people that came out of the acid jazz era, just continuing that approach to music,” says Kamaal Williams, the 28-year-old London producer/pianist whose new album The Return, on his own Black Focus Records, is out today, and on sale in a limited run on red vinyl via Vinyl Me, Please.

Photo by Renata Raksha

Listening to Valerie June sing is an exercise in unique transcendence, but the same could be said of listening to her talk. A native of Humboldt, Tennessee — a little more than halfway between Nashville and Memphis — June speaks with a honey-soaked drawl that could charm even the iciest coastal skeptic (now, she splits time between Tennessee and New York). It also adds an earthiness to her descriptions of the spiritual practice and meaning of her upcoming third studio album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers (out March 12), yet another bluesy, vibrant exploration of all the richest corners of American roots music.

No one expected Barbara Lea to have opinions. For the “attractive young vocalist,” as Lea was so often sold during her mid-’50s heyday, “attractive” and “young” were inevitably as or more important traits to many of the critics who assessed her work as the quality of her singing. 

That meant it took decades for the strident mandates and calculated process behind Lea’s understated, polarizing style to become anything more than an aside — but to her, they were always central. If her approach wasn’t necessarily singular, the ideas behind it certainly were; to use contemporary parlance, her takes were hot.

In the early 2010s, country music’s affinity for formulas had hit what sounded, to many critical listeners, like an all-time high. The ascendance of so-called “bro-country” and its attendant jacked-up trucks with beer can-filled beds and nameless, cutoff-clad female passengers seemed like the final form of the evolution of the genre’s trademark simplicity into grating, meaningless clichés.

The banality of country’s radio hits became so overwhelming that it spawned a whole subgenre of YouTube video, in which savvy critics spliced identical-sounding songs and hollow lyrics next to one another as evidence of how self-evidently dull it all was. “The formula works!” as songwriter Gregory Todd stated in his version of the video, which had six different contemporary country songs playing simultaneously — the result sounded like one seamless track. All but two of the songs he featured reached the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Country chart.

If the blues defined popular music of the 20th century, Coleman Hawkins — born four years into said century, and largely fueled by that 12-bar form — was nearly as undeniable a constant through its first half, if a less heralded one.

“An African instrument is not the piano; an African village is not the Both/And; an African Waltz is not in ¾,” wrote Michael S. Harper in his 1971 poem “Time For Tyner: Folksong.” It appears to depict some one-off performance in a drafty bar, while laying out some of the contradictions — between making art and fighting for justice, in searching for heritage when yours has been brutally robbed — that pianist McCoy Tyner was just starting to explore with the 1969 album that inspired the poem’s title.

In January, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Blossom Dearie, the 1957 Verge debut from jazz pianist Blossom Dearie. It was an album that introduced American audiences to the myriad of charms of Dearie, whose songs would go on to inspire artists like Feist and Norah Jones. It hasn’t been reissued on vinyl in the U.S. since it’s 1957 release. Read more about why we picked this title over here. You can sign up here.

Below, you can read an excerpt from our exclusive Listening Notes Booklet that is included with our edition of Blossom Dearie.

In October, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Fancy Free, a 1970 album from Donald Byrd. Originally released on Blue Note records, and just a few months after Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, it’s a seminal album in the fusion between electronic music, funk and jazz. Read more about why we picked this title over here. You can sign up here.

Below, you can read an excerpt from our exclusive Listening Notes Booklet that is included with our edition of Fancy Free.

The most enduring hit off of For My Broken Heart is — like “Fancy” before it — a pitch-perfect cover of a song that had already been enormously popular: “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia,” a gruesome murder ballad with a disarmingly upbeat (and catchy) chorus. Reba revived the tune with dramatic flair and effortless technique, and hers has slowly burned into becoming the definitive version of the single, going Gold nearly 30 years after its release.

It also fits well with the contemporary, non-musical perception of Reba, an endearingly kitschy country elder whose compelling hint of edge never erupts into full-fledged controversy. What’s taken her from small-town Oklahoma girl to mononymous star is a kind of specifically country combination of no-nonsense attitude and humble good humor.

The first sounds you hear on Nappy Roots’ 2002 debut Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz aren’t the thwacks of one of their trademark warm, rich beats, nor are they the twangy syllables that immediately connect the group to the then-exploding Southern rap scene. Instead you hear crickets, the kind of nature sounds you might pick up on some relaxation-oriented white noise machine. These are punctuated by trudging steps along what is unmistakably a dirt road.

Even if most members of the rap sextet aren’t actually from towns whose populations were three digits or less, the album embraces the idea of being country almost immediately. Not in a superficial way, with cowboy hats and big trucks, but in a way that is almost spiritual: humble, simple, down-to-earth.