Tom's Country View

Texas  is the second largest US-State, in terms of size as well as population. In other words, it is twice the size of Germany. So it should not come as a surprise, that is also has a music scene of its own, which very often remains fairly unknown outside of its statelines. Even a Texas Music Chart gets published on a weekly basis.

Waylon Jennnings is alive - at least this is what comes to mind, when listening to the current 2014-album of Sturgill Simpson ! It is stunning, how the critically acclaimed singer from Kentucky sounds, if you are familiar with the legend of Waylon Jennings . Just close your eyes and you are inclined to believe, you are listening to a lost Wayon song from the 1970s. In February of 2002 Waylon Jennings died from diabetes complications at the age of 64. It would cleary fill more than one blog entry to discuss the life of the famous country outlaw. But I guess anyone who has ever paid some attention to country music, will have run across the man, who so often gets mentioned alongside Willie Nelson . Not only because the two had become friends, but also because both of them had bravely turned their backs on Nashville in the 1970s and gone to Texas to create their own brand of Country Music, influenced by the Hippie-Folk-Rock sounds around then and there. In May of 2014 the vir...

"Tonight, I'm as low as any man can go   I'm down and I can't fall much farther   And once upon a time, You turned the water into wine   An' now, on my knees, I'm turning to You, Father   Could You help me turn the wine back into water?"   ('Wine Into Water' / T. Graham Brown, Ted Hewitt, Bruce Burch) In the mid 1980s a new voice caught the attention of Country Radio listeners. A voice that one would much rather expect to hear on Soul Radio. The unmistakable Blue Eyed Soul of T. Graham Brown , the white guy with the black voice from Georgia, brought a breath of fresh sounds into the Country Charts. Until the end of the 1980s, his T-Ness had achieved 3 Number-1 and 7 Top-10 Country Hits, among them such lasting favorites as ' Hell and High Water ', ' I Tell It Like It Used To Be ' or ' I Wish That I Could Hurt That Way Again '. In terms of style, he always remained a little difficult to categorize. ...