Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard 'Pioneering Women of Bluegrass: The Definitive Edition' out on October 21, 2022 on CD and digital, and available for pre-order now.

The soaring harmonies and driving string-band sound of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard shattered the glass ceiling of male-dominated bluegrass in the 1960s. Hazel and Alice’s influence on music – and not just roots music – is hard to overstate. They’ve been acknowledged by artists as diverse as country superstars Naomi and Wynonna Judd, champion flat-picker Molly Tuttle, and proto-feminist punk rocker Kathleen Hanna. Their steadfast devotion to their own hard-hitting style inspired generations of women in bluegrass.

The Definitive Pioneering Women of Bluegrass

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard - Childish Love

Charlie Parr 'Last of the Better Days Ahead', out July 30th, 2021 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on CD and digital and September 3rd, 2021 on 2xLP.

Charlie Parr’s newest album, Last of the Better Days Ahead, is a collection of powerful new songs about how one looks back on a life lived, as well as forward on what’s still to come. Its spare production foregrounds Parr’s poetic lyricism, his expressive, gritty voice ringing clear over deft acoustic guitar playing that references folk and blues motifs in Parr’s own exploratory, idiosyncratic style. When it comes to what it all means, Parr says it best: 

“Last of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I’m living in. I’m getting on in years, experiencing a shift in perspective that was once described by my mom as ‘a time when we turn from gazing into the future to gazing back at the past, as if we’re adrift in the current, slowly turning around.’ Some songs came from meditations on the fact that the portion of our brain devoted to memory is also the portion responsible for imagination, and what that entails for the collected experiences that we refer to as our lives. Other songs are cultivated primarily from the imagination, but also contain memories of what may be a real landscape, or at least one inspired by vivid dreaming. The album represents one full rotation of the boat in which we are adrift—looking ahead for a last look at the better days to come, then being turned around to see the leading edge of the past as it fades into the foggy dreamscape of our real and imagined histories.” – Charlie Parr

Charlie Parr - Last Of The Better Days Ahead

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Charlie Parr - Last Of The Better Days Ahead

Smithsonian Folkways

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