Tag archives: country

Rory Block got her first exposure to acoustic guitar as a pre-teen in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, fell in love with Mississippi Delta blues guitar before she turned 15, taught herself how to play the style by transcribing songs on old records, and then left home to find the masters in person. She released […]

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2nd Edition), there are several different versions of the last words of William Pitt (1759-1806), one of the greatest British statesmen. One version is “Oh my country! How I love my country!” Another is “Oh my country! How I leave my country!” A third version quotes the words […]

Asleep at the Wheel was just a country western band playing regular mountain music when Ray Benson co-founded the group in Paw Paw, West Virginia, back in 1970 – but after discovering Western Swing pioneer Bob Wills a few years later, the band never looked back.  “I was 19 when we started out, but as […]

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,Who never to himself hath said,This is my own, my native land!” My mother would often quote those lines – although, ironically, I am not sure now just which “native land” she could have been referring to. The lines are part of a much longer poem by Sir […]

“We live in the greatest country on Earth!” So said a caller on Bill Maher’s Real Time on the eve of the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Maher asked the caller how he knew this. “Because I have lived in the U.S. my entire life.” Maher tried to explain the illogic of this, […]