Remembering Amy Farris

Amy Farris was a jack of all instruments, teacher of many, fine arranger and committed Texan, though she lived the last years of her life in California. Word comes that she has died. Recently she had been touring with Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women, and several years ago put out an interesting and eclectic solo album called Anyway.

Here she is playing with Kelly Willis

I remember Amy best from her days in Austin, playing fiddle with Tish Hinojosa as dancers swirled across the floor at The Broken Spoke, being what Bruce Robison jokingly called the musical quarter back for Bruce and his wife Kelly Willis at the Cactus so many nights, backing up Kelly on a hot summer evening outdoors at Stubbs’ with the scent of Texas barbecue in the air, playing a Christmas season concert with Bruce and Kelly at Hyde Park Methodist Church with holiday decorations and evergreens for backdrop.

Playing fiddle in the heavenly choir now, Amy. Not forgotten you.


you may also want to see
Tish Hinojosa: Our Little Planet

listening to Christmas

Dakota Lullaby: Albert & Gage

Dakota Lullaby


The joyous side of love and the blue side, the thoughtful side, and the funny one, the crazy bits of friendship and the thought provoking ones, the quiet of a northern prairie night and the voices of those who made history there --- you meet all these ideas in Dakota Lullaby, the latest album from Christine Albert and Chris Gage. There are a dozen songs on the disc, varying in melody from swing to folk to country to blues, in tone from raucous to funny to reflective. Though they are outstanding songwriters themselves, Albert and Gage didn’t write the music on this collection. In fact, the songs were written some thirty years ago.

Chris Gage grew up in South Dakota, where he met Tom Peterson and got to know several of his songs. Lives and times and circumstances diverged; Peterson stayed in the Dakotas, while Gage hit the road to play music, first with the Red Willow Band, and later with Roy Clark and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Albert was meanwhile honing her musical chops as a country and folk singer in New Mexico. Albert and Gage both set a course for the music center of Austin, Texas, where they met and formed a musical partnership and a marriage. Their live sets and their albums mix their own folk Americana country style songs along with well chosen covers of music by writers including Erik Moll, Caroline Herring, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte Marie -- and occasionally Tom Peterson. Last year, circumstances worked out that another friend copied some old tapes of Peterson’s songs on to a CD.

“As we listened in the truck late one night I felt like we had just struck gold in the Black Hills,” Albert says. “Song after song, all written some thirty years ago, flew from the speakers right to my heart, and I was a goner for those words, those melodies, that spirit.” It’s a meeting of singers and songs that seems meant to be. Gage’s high energy take on If I Die Tomorrow brings to life a person we have all known, or been, with hints of a Cajun second line in the background of Peterson's prairie imagination. Albert and Gage join up on Cuttin’ a Rug to create vibrant images that could be real, could be a dream, all set to a swing melody that perfectly matches the words. Albert, who does haunting folk vocals better than just about anyone out there, brings those gifts to Those Who Love, a song which balances a lover’s lament and trust in hope framed in the quiet of a a prairie night sky. Then there’s the title song, Dakota Lullaby. It evokes landscapes and people, making the past present and the present past. It’s a cut and a song which deserve to become country classics.

The fine songs and outstanding singing are backed by a varied and interesting support, including harmonica from Mike Stevens, pedal steel from Lloyd Maines, clarinet from Michael Austin, and fiddle from Kenny Putnam.

Songs to think about long after the record is done -- and to laugh, dance, and sing along with while it plays --songs of Tom Peterson by Albert and Gage make an inspired combination, and a lasting one.

you may also want to see

Christine Albert: Paris, Texafrance

Albert & Gage: One More Christmas

Matt & Shannon & Ian & Sylvia

Wilderness Plots: the dvd

stephen bruton

Stephen Bruton, guitarist who worked with Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, Betty Buckley, Marcia Ball, and many others, died yesterday of cancer. A good and gracious man, as well as a good and gracious musician.

story from Stephen Bruton's home town paper, the Fort Worth Star Telegram

playing with the angels tonight, Stephen. go in peace.


my favorite of Stephen's solo albums
Spirit World

he recently produced Marcia Ball's Peace, Love & BBQ

Now playing: Eliza Gilkyson: beautiful world

Beautiful World


Political events, and opinions about them, occur in the midst of other parts of life, death, falling in love, stopping by the grocery store, seeing old friends -- and so it is, in a sense, with the songs on Eliza Gilkyson’s latest album. Great Correction was the first song Gilkyson wrote, inspired in part community conversation she hosted each weekend in Austin, Texas, with minister Jim Rigby and Professor Robert Jensen. “We wanted to provide a place to discuss, grieve, and mull over our future without having need for an immediate solution other that the comfort of each other’s presence,” Gilkyson says. Through her musical career, Gilkyson has explored the tensions and the gifts that exist when poetry and politic meet, and here she offers some of her best lyrics and most adventurous melodies yet. Not to mention, she’s a top class singer. The snazzy, jazzy almost tongue in cheek Unsustainable , the raw look behind what the world may see in someone and who that person really is in Dream Lover, love, joy and celebration of nature in Wildewood Spring -- this is perhaps a gentler Gilkyson that has been apparent in her more recent albums, one who’s drawn by passion and commitment more than fueled by anger. No less outspoken, though, and still deeply poetic and musical.

Down at the corner of ruin and grace
I’m growing weary of the human race
Hold my lamp up to everyone’s face
Looking for an honest man...

are the opening lines of The Great Correction.

Chris Maresh, Elana James, Cisco Ryder, Cindy Cashdollar, and Glenn Fukanaga are among those who back up Gilkyson on the recording.

you may also want to see this post

Music Road: now playing: Jeff Talmadge : At Least That Much Was True

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now playing: Karen Mal:The Space Between

The Space Between

When I was Three: that might, you'd think from the title, be a sentimental or perhaps funny song about childhood. In singer and songwriter Karen Mal’s hands, it’s instead a reflection of change, growing up and growing older, and looking back, that’s at once bittersweet and warm. Mal has a gift for that sort of duality: Suitcase Full of Memories adds a touch of humour to that sort mix as well.

This is the Austin based musician's third solo album. Her first was songwriter material and her second reflected her deep interest in Celtic music. Originals, both solo and co written, are the substance here, with a few covers and a traditional melody with Spanish lyric from Mal, called Te Acuerdo en Mis Suenos. There’s a nice snap of humor and a heat of sensuality in several of the songs, including Beaneath My Quit, A Sailor Returns to the Sea, and Everything About You. The title track found its start in a river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon, clearly a welcome ground for considering change, transition, and the space between all that. Mal sings in a light, crisp soprano, neither too sweet nor too dramatic, always in service of the song and always sharing the song with her listeners.

It took Mal a few career twists to find her home in folk music; among other things she spent a number of as an actor, and worked as a music director for theatrical productions. It’s all served her well on her way. “I hope I’m picking up some momentum now,” she says of her musical career. It’s well deserved.

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here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

Now playing: Christine Albert: Paris, Texafrance

“Europe is in my blood and Texas is in my soul,” says Christine Albert in the liner notes of Paris, Texafrance. Texafrance is the term Albert came up with to name that deep connection more than a dozen years go when she first started putting that aspect of her heritage and her music on record. In a solo career and as part of a duo with husband and musical partner Chris Gage, Albert writes and sings country, Americana, and folk styles; as a longtime resident of the southwest and specifically of Austin, Texas, the freewheeling openness of those lands comes into her music. So do her ties with Europe. Albert grew up in household where French was spoken as much s English, with a mother from the French speaking part of Switzerland and a grandmother from Paris.

You don’t have to know any of that to appreciate her work on this album, but it may explain her adventurous song choices -- Jesse Winchester and Michael Austin stand alongside Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf. Albert has a unique perspective on this music, a first generation child’s understanding of the parents and grandparents looking back and looking forward, loving home and leaving it for a new place and of the power of music to make and hold that connection. The songs here range from a jazzy opener by Trenet to a close with Piaf’s Hymne a l’amour. In many cases Albert mixes both French and English lyrics on the songs, in a way that completely honors the song and honors her background as well. Imagine a well understood and well loved song moving between two languages and sung under the lone star sky, and you’ve got it. Go take a listen,


more about Christine Albert and Chris Gage


Christine Albert’s web site

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now playing: Albert & Gage: One More Christmas

The first song on this recording, the title cut, came about when Christine Albert learned that her parents were planning to sell their home in New York State and move somewhere to the south. That’s a not so uncommon situation, but the emotions of it are not often spoken of in song. Here, Albert and Chris Gage have made a graceful original Christmas tale out of reflecting on that transition. These two, who are married, each had a thriving independent career before they got together a bit over a decade ago. Together, they make one of the most interesting musical collaborations to come out Texas -- or anywhere, for that matter. The dozen tracks on One more Christmas find them reverent with Must Be Tonight and Un Flambeau Jeanette Isabella, playing with the kids on Little Toy Trains, swingin’ with Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus, thoughtful with River, and sharing a joyous celebration on Go Tell It on the Mountain. Together they make One More Christmas an evergreen presentation of familiar and less well known holiday music. It’s on the couple’s Moonhouse Records label.

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