Makes my hillbilly heart glad to see news like this:
From a small Spring Valley factory, the Deering Banjo Co. is having its best year ever, defying the U.S. skills gap and California's manufacturing doldrums. It has expanded and trained its own workforce and expects to top $4 million in sales for the year ending June 30.
The boys in the band have become old men. Should the old men shuffle off the stage, or should their critics shut up?
My goodness, if even Bono is educable, maybe there's hope for making common sense the norm:
The Benghazi scandal is getting riper by the minute, a third of the country is dealing with the storm of the century, the economy is still on the verge of collapse and the debt is still unsustainable and growing, but let's not let any of those minor concers distract us from the really important issues:
In a column for Saturday's paper about the Bob Dylan concert at Parkview Field, I wrote this:
Dang, I bet somebody could write a good country song about this:
Country superstar Randy Travis walked naked into a convenience store to buy cigarettes, touching off a bizarre series of events that ended with him being charged with threatening to shoot a state trooper in North Texas, police and sources said.
This year, for the first time in history, more old albums will be sold than new ones. In the first half of 2012, "catalog" albums -- those released more than 18 months ago -- sold 76.6 million units. New units tallied 73.9 million. And the difference are likely to increase -- "new" will never outsell "old again." Why is this happening?
Just in time for my fuddy-duddy "this dang music today is awful" stage comes this validation:
The scepticism about modern music shared by many middle-aged fans has been vindicated by a study of half a century's worth of pop music, which found that today's hits really do all sound the same.
Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson hit out at a fan who spent more time on his mobile phone than watching the band at a recent US gig.
The Quietus reports that a show at the Klipsch Music Center in Indiana, Indianapolis on July 19th was disrupted by the man, who lead singer Dickinson took exception to.
Kitty Wells has died. She wasn't just a singer but a pioneer and a honked-off woman who got even with a song. I love that kind of music -- Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" takedown of Neil Young's "Southern Man" comes to mind. Wells' first and biggest hit "It wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" falls into the same category:
