General

Update: The Browns backed into a less-than-solid 7-9 season. LeBron came back… The Browns are backing into a solid .500 season… Urban hipsters are actually moving to northeast Ohio… We’ve got a [...]

“Turn your head to the left and cough.” I never knew what this annual test was for until I recently flunked it. “You’ve got a hernia,” my doctor said with a twinkle in his eye, clearly pleased [...]

Here’s a re-post in honor of the late, great Cowboy Jack Clement (briefly interviewed below) and Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story – an excellent new bio by Rick Bragg (excerpt here). I’m not [...]

With all the great original music coming out of the Rubber City, I’m almost embarrassed to say that one of my favorite local bands plays covers. Not your garden-variety covers, like the kind of [...]

Time for a re-post. This one will do just fine. Dr. John, the Night Tripper. Gris-gris man. Guru of hoodoo. Master of New Orleans rhythm and funk. With Dr. John, New Orleans native Mac Rebennack [...]

Someone asked me why I cover so much musical turf elsewhere (including artists/labels in southwest Ohio) when there’s a lot of great talent here in the Rubber City to feature. I [...]

Just a few random observations from my recent week-long vacation in Atlantic Beach, NC: Weather was spectacular, and so were the sights — many dolphins close to shore, wild horses roaming [...]

The Voice just kicked off its 7th season on NBC… Seems like a good excuse to talk about Wynonie Harris – a truly badass blues shouter who would send the smug, preening judges on (insert [...]

Let’s revisit this post by Professor Jack, our resident expert on radiatin’ the 88s. Blues started with the voice – call and response. The next step was to add a single vibrating [...]

I have this thing that I like to do on long drives. I have an iPod (does Apple still make these things, if only to sell as an accessory for the Plymouth Grand Voyager?), and I’ll just hit random [...]

While killing time at Barnes & Noble, I picked up the Sept. issue of Guitar World with Nephew Dan on the cover and read several comments about yours truly – mainly as an early source of blues [...]

I’ve always had great respect for the power of a well-crafted protest song. But you won’t find me poring over an album by Pete Seeger (god rest his soul). I’d rather hear Miles Davis deconstruct [...]

How does one discuss the Akron music scene without pissing off hordes of people? For long stretches of time, there really wasn’t much of a scene at all (unless you were willing to drive 20 miles [...]

Here are a couple new releases with decidedly old-school sounds. Bobby Patterson hails from Dallas, where he cut his first soul records back in the Sixties for the Jetstar label. He’s another one [...]

Someone raided my music collection to put together the soundtrack for the movie Chef. OK, I’m exaggerating… But if you were lucky enough to catch this small miracle of a film since its theatrical [...]

Have you ever been to a W hotel? Basically, you start with a Westin… pump some EDM into the lobby… drape a few supermodels over the sofas… throw in a couple of glowing waterwalls… charge $20 for [...]

I rarely sit down and listen to Zydeco music for an extended period of time. But I wouldn’t think twice about throwing it on at a party, because the best Zydeco has the power to move even the [...]

Time for this hopeless Blue Note fanatic to pay tribute to the jazz label’s 75 years in business. I was inspired by a recent article on NPR.org by a couple of top-notch music writers – Tom Moon [...]

I just read another music-related article with a variation on the word “fogey” (fogeyism, fogeyish, fogeyist)… Maybe I should search these terms to see if they’re being used to describe [...]

I’ve been at this RCR thing for nearly five years now, and we just published our 250th post. Imagine if I would’ve put all that effort into a solid money-making venture, like cooking meth, [...]

In our last post, I bemoaned the fact that rock ‘n roll was the nail in R&B’s coffin – sealing the fate of countless shouters, honkers, stringbenders and piano pounders who thrived after [...]