holiday gift ideas: early edition

It is a time of year when travels, visits, and friends and family gatherings come along, as well as many holidays. Music is is always a good gift, and easy to carry along with you, great to share. As you may be beginning to choose gifts for those holiday visits here are suggestions to get you thinking. Follow the links in the titles of these albums to learn more about each of them.


If you’ve someone who enjoys quiet meditation in his or her music, Bill Miller’s Spirit Wind East could be just the thing. Miller is Native American, of the Stockbridge-Munsee-Mohican nation. He has worked with artists in many areas of music and created his own albums as well. For this one, he uses the breath of his flute to reflect on the spirit, landscape and lives of the tribes of the northeastern United States. Music includes Where Waters never Still, Eastern Woodland, Nighthawk, and Founding Brothers.

If you’ve a person on your list who enjoys songs which are like three minute movies, filled with character and story, then Matraca Berg’s album The Dreaming Fields is a good choice. Berg’s stories will make you think as well as entertain you, and she is a fine singer as well.

New parents as well as lovers of Celtic music on your list will enjoy Lullabies for Love. On it, musicians including to Irish band Altan and Scottish style composer and fiddle player Hanneke Cassel join up for a collection of songs for children and parents. Proceeds from the album go to help a project for children in Kenya, too.

Those Celtic music lovers will also like Shannon Heaton’s The Blue Dress, which comprises traditional and original Irish music on the flute. In fact, if you’ve someone with adventurous music tastes on your list, why not choose both
Miller’s and Heaton’s flute music for them. Perhaps add Fred Morrison’s Outlands for a taste of innovative music from Scotland on the bagpipes, too.You could add in Everything Is Everywhere from Carrie Newcomer, as well, an album in which Americana and the music of India meet.

How about seasonal music? Jennifer Cutting’s Ocean Orchestra has that covered, with Song of Solstice. Music for the light and dark of the holiday season and the turning of the year, quiet pieces and ones to sing along with are just a taste of the interesting and lively music on this disc. Perhaps you’ll get Song of Solstice for yourself as well, to get you in the festive mood as you prepare for the winter holidays.


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Music Road: holiday gift list: American harvest
Music Road: Best Music, 2010

The Dreaming Fields: Matraca Berg

In her song The Dreaming Fields, Matraca Berg walks through her grandfather’s farm, finding memory of brighter days and childhood love, strength and courage and hard work, and loss and grief . The farm will no longer be a farm; it’s being sold off for building lots.

Berg handles all those facts and the emotions that come with them with the heart and hand of a songwriter who knows that songs have their own lives, and that in the joining of ideas, music, and voice there is need for space. Space for the listener, and room for ideas and questions which rarely have neat and tidy and once and for all answers.

Questions and change are themes which run through the album of which The Dreaming Fields is the title track. That will not surprise anyone who has followed the Nashville based writer’s work. Those who have include Patty Loveless, Marina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Trisha Yearwood, and the Dixie Chicks, who have all recorded Berg’s work. Fellow award winning writers and singers Gretchen Peters and Suzy Bogguss, who join up with Berg for concerts they call Wine Woman and Song are two more.

In the fourteen years since her last album, Berg has chosen to stay behind the scenes, writing the songs that have earned Grammy nominations, Country Music Association Awards, and induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. She has mostly played her songs at the Bluebird and other listening rooms, and with her friends Bogguss and Peters. “I did a tour of the UK with Gretchen Peters and Suzy Bogguss, which I did for the fun of it mostly,” Berg says. “I’d not had a record out in forever, but it seemed like I could go see some cool places with friends, and I was stunned to see lines of people everywhere we went who were wanting to buy my record.” So she decided it was time, and she also decided to make the recording on her own terms, producing the project herself.


The listeners waiting in those lines, and the artists who have recorded Berg’s music over the years, have heard the voices of people who you know have lives beyond the moments of the song, from the bleak reality of the woman in If I Had Wings to the simmering desire of the one in You and Tequila to the wry and telling humor of the conversation in Your Husband’s Cheating on Us. They have heard the deep and vividly rendered honesty of grieving in Racing the Angels and South of Heaven, of holding on to place and home in O Cumberland, and of finding your way through love in A Cold Rainy Morning in London in June. .



Berg is a master lyricist, that’s true, and she’s also a master musician, pairing her words with melody and arrangement that serve the words and enhance them without ever getting in the way. She’s unafraid to be spare about that, too: the title track, for example, is just Berg on piano and John Catchings on cello, to back up Berg’s voice -- and that’s just exactly enough, as she evokes her grandmother’s kitchen, her grandfather working the fields, and rain on the rusted plow.


“Making an album was important,” she says. “ ... not a checklist of singles and themes, but something that was a piece of work where you’re going through a part of people’s lives. I wanted the listeners to pass through those lives, those moments, and understand what was going on, because, like lot of people, I’m in a place in my life where life is a big deal -- a lot of grief, aging people, trying to keep a marriage together, all kinds of family things going on, things you can’t escape because that is life. That’s what life is really made of, and hopefully, this album too.”

The Dreaming Fields is a master class in songwriting -- any sort of writing, really. It’s also just plain good listening. filled with songs that will have you thinking about their stories long after the music is done

follow this link to see Matraca Berg singing South of Heaven from that UK tour with Gretchen Peters and Suzy Bogguss

you may also wish to see


Music Road: Gretchen Peters: Northern Lights
Music Road: lead and harmony
Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, 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.

Lead and harmony

A year ago on 29 May, Suzy Bogguss, Gretchen Peters, and Matraca Berg were on tour in England, and they recorded this song on that day. Just listen.



you may also wish to see
Music Road: Road Trip Music in Tennessee

Music Road: Gretchen Peters: One to the Heart, One to the Head

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, 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.

Road Trip Music in Tennessee

From the blues and Elvis in Memphis to the heartbeat of country and the soul of gospel in Music City through the high lonesome of the Great Smokey Mountains, Tennessee is a state and a people filled with music, and with musical contrasts which yet seem to work together. Right now, middle Tennessee and Nashville are recovering and still hurting from recent major flooding, the worst the area has seen in more than a hundred years. As the Great American Road Trip winds through Tennessee, take a listen to music from two Nashville natives -- and it may not be quite what you’d expect.

















Amy Grant is a fine songwriter -- she has new album out, in fact, and well worth your listening. Her album from a few years back called Legacy...Hymns & Faith will take you deep into the heart of the American South, though. If you grew up in the region, this music played in the background of your daily life, whatever your religious thoughts. If you’re not familiar with the area, listening to this music will teach you more about it.

Matraca Berg is the writer behind many top country hits, and even more songs that make fine album cuts for stars including Patty Loveless, Martina McBride, and Pam Tillis. Her own solo albums such as Lying to the Moon & Other Stories sometimes take a bit of looking for. They are well worth it, filled with great singing and vivid, insightful writing, which is by turns funny, serious, thoughtful, and lyrical.

The Cumberland River winds through the heart of downtown Nashville. Here’s Berg singing Oh Cumberland.




you may also wish to see.
Berg often appears with musical friends Gretchen Peters and Suzy Bogguss as Wine Women & Song

Music Road: Nashville floods -- how you can help
Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee - another way to help Nashville
Music Road: Amy Grant: Mosaic

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

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, 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.

photographing music: connections

Connection -- player to listener, musician to musician, melody to idea, harmony to harmony, instrument to voice -- is part of the work of music. It is also part of the work of life which music helps us see and know.




























thanks to the musicians who were kind enough to let me take these shots: Shannon and Matt Heaton, Hanneke Cassel and Cathie Ryan, Mark Stuart and Stacey Earle, Eileen Ivers and Greg Anderson, and Matraca Berg, in Cambridge, Fall River, Austin, Tallahassee, and Nashville.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: creative practice: winter light, and music
Music Road: Reflections: five of the best
Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

photographs taken by and copyright Kerry Dexter.

Photographing music, continued

light and shadow, and music

you may also want to see

Music Road: Reflections: five of the best
Music Road: creative practice: music in silence

-->If you'd like to support my creative work,
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.