Road Trip Music in Alabama: bluegrass, faith, & architecture

Fishing boats on Mobile bay, the home of the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa. rocket scientists in Huntsville, farmers in the wiregrass, civil rights history and civil war history: all this is Alabama. The state has a top country group as namesake, as well as a classic rock song. For this part of the journey of the Great American Road Trip: Music, the soundtrack features two artists with Alabama in their personal histories, Claire Lynch and Emmylou Harris.




Claire Lynch’s base is in bluegrass -- she’s been nominated for Grammys and won a number of top bluegrass awards for her work -- but it is a solid starting point, not a limit, for her musical taste and imagination. Her most recent recording, Whatcha Gonna Do, makes that point clearly. The range of her art includes traditional bluegrass, progressive bluegrass, a couple of contemporary faith based songs, some swing, and a touch of country. Lynch chooses from all these genres and writes her own material as well. Lynch lived for some years in north Alabama, and among other things wrote a really nice homecoming from the road song called Hills Of Alabam which country star Kathy Mattea recorded some years back. Whatcha Gonna Do makes a fine companion for the winding roads of Alabama, but you won’t go wrong with any of Claire Lynch’s recordings.


The same could be said of Emmylou Harris. Through her career as a pioneer of Americana music and contemporary folk, Harris has been most associated with California and with Nashville. She was born in Birmingham, though, and that deep south background comes through in her work. Her album Red Dirt Girl is anchored in thoughts of Alabama, both in songs she’s written, and songs she’s covered. Another fine Alabama road trip companion from Harris is her often overlooked recording of gospel songs and hymns, Angel Band














While you are thinking about or traveling though Alabama, you may also like to listen to An Architecture of Decency, a podcast from Speaking of Faith. It tells about an innovative project at Auburn University which involves love, compassion, architecture, and rural Alabama. Close to the end of the program, they play a bit of Harris's song Red Dirt Girl, too, quite an inspired connection of narrative and lyric.




photograph of Emmylou Harris on left copyright Kerry Dexter

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Claire Lynch: Crowd Favorites
Music Road: Music Road trip in West Virginia
Emmylou Harris: Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town
more music from the road trip


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Stop by and see what the Library has in mind to inspire travels through the heart of the deep south.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Island & Sea & Gaelic song: Maggie MacInnes

Maggie MacInnes
A Fagail Mhiughalaigh (Leaving Mingulay)

Family, faith, fishing, and the sea: those four things were the strongest ties which kept people who lived on the remote Scottish island of Mingulay going. They are what form the ideas around which Gaelic singer and clarsach player Maggie MacInnes bases the music she’s chosen for this album, as well.

There is family connection for MacInnes, too. Mingulay is uninhabited today, but her great grand parents lived there, and the musician has long been drawn to thinking about how people in such a remote community -- Mingulay is twelve miles off the coast of the island of Barra, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, and the Outer Hebrides themselves are separated by forty miles of water from the northwestern coast of mainland Scotland -- sustained themselves.

When MacInnes was invited to prepare music for a
television documentary about Mingulay and its people, she began gathering her ideas into music. Music from that film is on this recording, some of it rearranged, added to, and remixed, and there is new music as well. The album comprises traditional music, including a hymn which was a favorite of Macinnes’ great grandmother. There is a song from a seventeenth century female bard from the island, as well as a song of fairy legend, several waulking songs from the island’s women’s work, songs of history and of life on the sea, and the instrumental title track, which is composed by MacInnes. In the singing, playing, and song selection, it is a graceful and thoughtful project, illuminating lives and landscapes in ways that connect them with lives today.

Michael McGoldrick on flute, Christine Hanson on cello, Brian McAlpine on keyboards, and and renown Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil on backing vocals are among those who support MacInnes on the project.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: Julie Fowlis:Uam
Music Road: Mary Ann Kennedy & Na Seoid
Music Road's Scottish music store at Amazon

Road Trip Music in Florida

The other Florida, the land and people, lakes and rivers and woods and towns which exist beyond the tourist trails and high powered beach fronts, is where the Great American Road Trip winds today.

Jeanie Fitchen knows this quieter side of the Sunshine State well. On her album Roads she writes of the dance of the sandhill crane, the Native peoples of Florida, and the little known lives of workers in the turpentine camps years ago.
















Fitchen is from Florida’s east coast. Del Suggs grew up in the northwest part of the state, in the Panhandle. He calls his brand of songs saltwater music, and his style has been called Jimmy Buffet meets James Taylor. There’s that time just before a hurricane hits the coast, which Suggs nails in Hurricane’s Comin’, and the lives of a Wooden Boat. which he explores in the title track of one of his first albums. Life on the waters involves a more contemplative side too, an idea which comes in for songs on Living Deliberately, although the lighter side of things is well represented there too.

If you’ve had enough of Disney World and Miami, or if that’s all you know of Florida, let Fitchen and Suggs lead you on a journey through a different state of mind and geography.



you may also wish to see

Music Road: Almost Christmas: Del Suggs and friends

Music Road: reflections with Adrienne Young

Music Road: Road Trip Music in Tennessee


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Stop over and see what's on tap for Florida.

For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Scotland on the harp: Corrina Hewat

Corrina Hewat is an artist whose vision encompasses both solo performance and composing for large ensembles, who believes in the interconnectedness of jazz and folk music, and who relishes the collaborative nature of working with other artists and the solitary time needed to create on her own. She also an artist with a full schedule: she’s appeared on more than thirty albums in the last dozen years in addition to composing several major commissions and keeping up her own practice in performing and teaching.

Hewat is from Scotland, and her chosen instrument for her own playing is the harp, both the small harp and the big pedal kind. On her solo album Harp I Do she offers tunes that are at once melodic and percussive, and, if you need categories, would fit into both jazz and folk. “You know, I think the jazz thing is really folk music too. I don’t see them as merging folk and jazz, I actually think it’s just one big music. I don’t distinguish between them,” she says.

Hewat grew up in the Scottish Highlands, in the Black Isle north of Inverness. Her family moved there from Edinburgh when Hewat was eight, “and it was a really good thing for me. There was a real community there, a sense of sharing our lives, and of sharing music, in the Highlands,” she recalled. She was led to the harp “because I saw this woman sitting and playing one. I said to her ‘I like that, can I have a go?’ and she let me try, and it was like I could do this. I was twelve, and knew some piano and some fiddle, but the harp immediately made total sense. it just made total sense to me.”

The harp player, Christine Martin, offered the young Corrina lessons, “and so once a week for a year, we did that. My mum would drive me over, and Christine lent me a harp, and later on her husband built me a harp -- which exploded six months later! But if it wasn’t for their kindness, I don’t think I’d be playing the harp, ‘cause it’s kind of an expensive instrument,” Hewat pointed out. To own her own harp, she recalled, “it took eight years -- my family and I, and my granny too, we all saved up for the harp.” She followed traditional music through Feis Rois weekend workshops and a time at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Her love of jazz took her to the University of Leeds, where she received an honors degree in jazz and contemporary music on the harp and studied with respected Irish harp player Maire Ni Chathasaigh.















She and her husband David Milligan, who plays piano, formed a duo which became a quartet as a trumpet player and a drummer joined in. The group, called Bachue, was about to add another aspect to Hewat’s musicianship, as well.

”We were booked for a gig at the Celtic Connections festival, and we were playing all instrumental music, involved, complex stuff. The festival director suggested that we add some songs. People relate to songs, he said, they'll connect to you if you do some songs. So we did. I was the singer. That was that!” says Hewat of her early experience singing from the stage. “My mum and dad played a lot of music around the house, Neil Young, Bob Dylan -- that’s where I learnt my first harmony singing really, singing along and finding different harmony parts to those recordings,” Hewat said. It hadn't been something she’d done in public much until that gig at Celtic Connections, though. These days she’s known as much for her singing as for her playing, and is in demand as a teacher of lively and engaging harmony singing workshops. You can also catch her singing as part of the trio Grace, Hewat, and Polwart, in which she joins fellow Scots Annie Grace and Karine Polwart for evenings of music that are very musical and often also very funny.

Singing songs has another benefit for Hewat. “It’s one of the times when the music going on inside my head stops and I focus on that song,” she says. “It’s like I have this constant flow of music, like an orchestra going in inside my head all the time -- which is grand!” It’s also sometimes hard to keep up with the flow of ideas. “I use my mobile phone a lot, sing myself messages, and I have a little half size manuscript paper that I carry around to make notes, too. They might just be phrases or lines. Then, when I have a moment, I’ll start looking a t batches of them and seeing what works and what doesn’t, and six pieces might all go together to make one big grand piece of music -- or they might end up being six different things!” she says, laughing.

One place her musical ideas go is to the band she and Milligan started, The Unusual Suspects. It’s a folk orchestra of sorts. “There’re twenty two of us, each coming form different regional traditions.-- I love hearing how which one is from the Borders, who’s from Aberdeen, who’s from Inverness or Shetland, all comes out in their music,” she says.

A commission to compose and play at L 'Orient Celtique festival in France gave the group time to play and rehearse together, something they don’t often have, or have the budget for. “As a composer, and musical director, it’s hard. We don’t get to rehearse much, and then when we do something has to work right away or drop it because the time’s so short. But this is a passion David and I have, to work on this band,” Hewat says. With the quality of their music and performance, they are igniting that passion in others, too. Audiences and music writers alike call The Unusual Suspects one of the most exciting bands working today.

Hewat conitnues to perform with Grace, Hewat and Polwart, as well as teach workshops. The Unusual Suspects are just launching a new recording, and Hewat and Milligan are working on a new project called The Gordon Duncan Experience, a youth big band based in the Perth and Kinross area. Hewat will also conitnue composing, and listening to the music. “Just walking down the street, I can hear rhythm and music in the sounds around me, and it’s grand,” Corrina Hewat says.


you may also wish to see
Music Road: Hanneke Cassel: For Reasons Unseen
Music Road: Catriona McKay: Starfish

music and hope: Derry

Memory and emotion have run high in Derry with the release of the Saville Report, the result of a twelve year investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday thirty eight years ago. People lay dead on the streets of Derry then, and it is one of the events which deepened the divisions and struggles across the political and personal landscapes of Ireland.

Music has always been a part of the conflict, and the grieving, and the reach for reconciliation. On his album Let the Circle Be Wide Tommy Sands has a song woven from the familiar calls of both sides of the conflict, another one that considers the changes war and anger can bring in a person, a song that asks questions about times for change, and several songs, including the title track, offering hope.






















Several years ago, the BBC did a series of programs in which they invited writers to create songs based on interviews with people involved in certain events and ways of life. Radio Ballads: Northern Ireland contains both songs and spoken word from people with varying perspectives on the events of the last forty years in the north of Ireland.

Cara Dillon had a chart hit with a song Tommy Sands wrote which puts the political struggles into the context everyday life, called There Were Roses.Here is a video of Cara Dillon singing There Were Roses live.

There are other songs of conflict, and of reconciliation, of history, and of hope across the north of Irealnd, among them Sean Tyrell’s The 12th Of July (Lament For The Children)
and Robbie O’Connell’s There Is Hope. When people sing together, there is the possibility of hope.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: patrick season: far from home
Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black
Derry: healing through the arts
and Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

this is part of a Lonely Planet Blogsherpa carnival on favourite places, hosted by Anne-Sophie Redisch at
Sophie’s World

music for father's day

In her song I’ll Go Too, Carrie Newcomer traces the turns from father reassuring daughter to daughter giving her father comfort. It’s a gentle take on growing, risking, grieving, faith, and connection. My Father's Only Son offers another look at the father and child connection, changing as the child grows, framed in memorable images of fishing and evenings in the midwest. You may find both of these songs on her album Betty's Diner: The Best of Carrie Newcomer.

If you might be looking for an Irish tune for the day, guitarist Donal Clancy has that covered, with the piece Ask My Father, on his recording
Close to Home.




you may also wish to see
The Clancy Legacy

Carrie Newcomer: Before & After

Mother: music celebrating mothers and motherhood: McKeown, Ryan, Spielberg

Julie Fowlis:Uam

Uam means from me in Scottish Gaelic. That is what you hear on this recording, a very distinct point of view. Julie Fowlis is a Scot who grew up in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. She’s also an artist, musician, and thinker completely of the twenty first century.

The music she offers here is rooted and grounded in the old songs she learnt from tradition bearers while she was growing up. It is also rooted and grounded in that tradition spoken with taste and affection in a contemporary voice. Thig am bata (The boat will come) is a fast paced song with a strong but challenging beat, which she invited bodhran player Martin O’Neill to explore with her. On an old milking song, she’s joined by fellow Hebridean Mary Smith of Lewis for the singing and Phil Cunningham provides piano and accordion backing. That aforementioned song about the boat coming is a sort of murder ballad from the Hebrides. Fowlis pairs it with a like story which made its way from Ireland into American folk tradition where it is known and Wind and Rain. Fowlis and top notch Scottish singer Eddi Reader trade verses in Scottish Gaelic and English in a way which really illuminates the story of the song.

A Chiad Cheum (The First Step) is a lovely tune Fowlis and her husband, bouzouki player Eamon Doorley, composed for the wedding of a cousin. It allows the talents of Fowlis and Doorley’s frequent musical compatriots fiddler Duncan Chisholm, guitarist Tony Byrne, and bass player Ewan Vernal to come especially clear, and the two of them join in on whistle and bouzouki, respectively, as well. When Fowlis and Doorley played a festival in another Celtic area, Brittany in France, there they were asked to do a Breton song. Translated from Breton into Scottish Gaelic, the one they chose fits well in place in this collection. The title in comes over to English as I was born in the midst of the sea, an idea anyone from the western isles could easily appreciate.

There are sad songs and lively songs, ballads and working songs, songs which spring directly from the Hebrides and songs with touches of other traditions. Whether you understand Scottish Gaelic or not (there are English translations in the liner notes if you do not), you hear the sea, the land, the lives and loves of people in the songs, the wind and the weather. You hear Scotland, through the music of a gifted and original musician who is choosing to apply her gifts in service of traditional music and language.

Side note: should you have the chance to see Fowlis and her musical friends play live, take it. It is an engaging experience not to be missed. . Another side note: apologies to Gaelic speakers: this keyboard does not handle fadas well.



you may also wish to see

Dual: Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh
Music Road: season of change: music for autumn

music and community, continued

Music opens doors for us to connect, create, and inspire.

















music to go along with these ideas
Music Road: music and change
Music Road: music and community
Music Road: Hanneke Cassel: For Reasons Unseen

photographs from Cooley, Cambridge, and Newcastle
copyright Kerry Dexter


you may also wish to see
Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

from Denmark: Helene Blum

Helene Blum sings in an expressive soprano, taking ideas and melodies of her native land into contemporary song and shedding light on music from Danish tradition. Her solo album En Gang og Altid is a fine showcase for both these things, whether or not you speak Danish. She has an excellent Christmas album out as well.

So what is Danish folk music? As Denmark is both harbour and crossroads, geographically, so it is musically. Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and the Celtic lands all come in as influencers, and in many ways Danish folk music stirs all that into its own sound, a sound Blum has been exploring since childhood, when she first took up the violin. Singing called to her as time passed, though, and she became the first vocalist to receive a diploma from the folk music program at Denmark’s renown Carl Nielsen Academy. She tours and teaches internationally, and has appeared at the Celtic Colours Festival on Cape Breton and Celtic Connections in Glasgow, among other places.

En Gang og Altid (the title translates to English as Once and Forever) is a lovely musical journey -- and there’s an Irish twist to it as well, with Armagh native Brian Finnegan sitting in on flutes for the opening song, Vil som du jeg, and several other tracks as well. Harald Haugaard, who co wrote a number of the tunes, supports on fiddle and other instruments, and with Blum co produced the tasteful arrangements of fiddle, cello, flute, guitar and occasional horns which back her voice.




Are you following the World Cup? Denmark has a team in the running. No football commentary forthcoming here along the music road, but as soccer fever rages over the next weeks, from time to time music and musicians from countries with teams at the World Cup matches in South Africa will come in for comment to add to your enjoyment of the sport.


you may also wish to see
Music Road: Three Fiddle CDs for Fall

Music Road: photographing music: Celtic Colours.

Music Road: Patty Larkin: 25

Road Trip Music: South Carolina & Georgia

The deep south is a varied as the turn of a kaleidoscope, in landscape, in people, in accents, in food, and in music. South Carolina native Dulcie Taylor gets at all that in several ways on her album Mirrors & Windows. She offers songs with elements of blues, folk, r&b, and rock, and makes it all work well. The subjects are conversational and thought provoking. Especially check out one of the folk tinged stories, Blackberry Winter, a fine marriage of melody and lyric.

Josh Turner is a rising country star, who got his start singing in church in Hanna, South Carolina. His breakthrough hit to the country charts was a sort of twenty first century gospel song he thought nobody would ever want to hear, called Long Black Train. Give a listen.


Bernice Johnson Reagon has been an activist, a college professor, a museum curator, an author, and the founder of the much awarded singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. She got her start, though, singing first in her church and then during the civil rights days of western Georgia. and on Give Your Hands to Struggle she brings in parts of both those things.

These are sound tracks for your road trip through South Carolina and Georgia.

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

you may also want to see
Music Road: Road trip music in the district: Washington DC

Music Road: easter eve: rani arbo & daisy mayhem: house be blessed

a selection of recommended songwriter cds

music and world oceans day

There is so much music in the waters. Oceans,bays, lakes, streams. rivers, and rain are sources that artists of all sorts have drawn on across time and place.

Ireland is a very sea born land, and so is Scotland, as well as many of the other places whose music you find here along the music road.

We’ve just been talking about the floods in Nashville. There are healing aspects to waters too, and that is what is celebrated on World Oceans Day, which is June 8th each year.


















These are photos of the Irish Sea, and here is music to consider as you think about this day
Music Road: Oceans & Journeys: Road Trip in Maryland
Music Road: thinking about Cape Breton: music and landscape
Music Road: cathie ryan: the farthest wave
Music Road: Dual: Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh

other interesting insights on World Oceans Day, and the oceans in our lives
What you can do to help the oceans, and photos of the seas at Cape Cod, from Alexandra Grabbe of Chez Sven B&B in Wellfleet
Ways to celebrate and help the oceans from travel expert Donna Hull
thanks to Gretchen Peters for the heads up on the Hands Across the Sand project, where you can learn more about ocean ecology, offshore drilling, and an event coming up 26th June
a review of the movie Oceans


you may also wish to see
Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

Road Trip Music in North Carolina

A tale of two guitarists winds through the North Carolina mountains.

Doc Watson, from Deep Gap, has been playing guitar across genres and influencing other players for decades now. Country, blues, jazz, folk, swing, and storytelling of all sorts make their way in to Doc’s view of music. He has recorded dozens of albums. One of the best is Riding the Midnight Train

John Doyle was born in Ireland, but the turns of his life have led him to make Asheville his home. He is a creative and innovative guitarist, fine writer of melodies (and now and then lyrics), respecter and re inventor of songs from all aspects of Irish tradition. For a taste of what he’s been doing recently, give a listen to Karan Casey and John Doyle: Exiles Return


you may also wish to see
Music Road: John Doyle: Wayward Son

Music Road: cathie ryan: the farthest wave


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Stop by and see what the Library has in mind to inspire travels through North Carolina. It's an award winning mystery story.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Michael McGoldrick: Aurora

Michael McGoldrick becomes a bit of a pied piper on his latest recording Aurora,
leading with his his wooden flute and uillean pipes a journey which is grounded in Irish tradition and travels out into jazz, Americana, African rhythms, and touches of other Celtic lands as well. Much of the music is original, with a few well chosen bits of trad and contemporary work. More so that in his recent solo outings, the Irish strand of things is very central to the sound. This is music which fits in with that tradition and is at the same time of the present day.

The whole album -- a dozen sets -- unfolds with a sense of journey and travel, one which is open enough for listeners to map their own roads with it. Freefalling is the name of the opening set, and the first tune on it is named You Go First, which, McGoldrick writes in the notes, was inspired by doing a bunjee jump in New Zealand. The Late Nights at the Central set had its start in a different if equally energetic place, late night sessions on the Old Central Hotel in Glasgow during the Celtic Connections Festival. There are very fine quieter tunes, as well, among them Anam Cara and the traditional The Stone of Destiny.

The Corrieveckan set, from Donald Shaw, who produced this album and with whom McGoldrick plays in the Scotland based band Capercaillie, is one of the contemporary covers. as is Waterbound, by American Dirk Powell. McGoldrick sings on Waterbound, in a sandpaper and silk pairing with guest vocalist Heidi Talbot and with a fine turn on the fiddle from John McCusker. Others supporting McGoldrick here include longtime musical friends Dezi Donnelly and John Joe Kelly along with Anna Massie, Signy Jakobsdottir, Dermot Byrne and others.

McGoldrick himself is in demand as a guest artist, having worked on recordings by Youssou N’Dour, Kate Rusby, Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh, Karan Casey, and Cathie Ryan among others. His contributions to their projects are always worth hearing.

As Michael McGoldrick plays own music out front on Aurora, though, it sounds as though he is taking a journey -- and as though he’s coming home.


you may also wish to see
Music Road: Music for St Andrew's Day: music of Scotland

Music Road: Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton

Music Road: music and change