americana | Musicosity

americana

Able

There is more than one artist with this name: 1) Able is an Australian band comprised of Joel Houston, Marty Sampson, Luke Munns, and Michael Guy Chislett (of The Academy Is...), who broke up in 2001 after winning the Channel V Leg Up Competition so that they could pursue their activities with the Hillsong United band.
2) Able is the name of an ambient electronic artist from Denver CO. His music is on the netlabel www.ropeswingcities.com
He fuses acoustic with minimal sounds and field recordings to create highly enjoyable, nostalgic sounding music.

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Los Lobos

Los Lobos is a mexican-american rock band from East Los Angeles, heavily influenced by rock and roll, tex-mex, country music, folk, blues, and traditional spanish / mexican music such as boleros and norteños. Formed in the late 1970's, band members Dave Hidalgo, Cesar Rojas, Steve Berlin, Louie Pérez and Conrad Lozano became the bellwether for Mexican-American music in the U.S. when they recorded the music for "La Bamba" in 1987, which added popular acclaim to the critical praise they had received for their 1984 album "How Will the Wolf Survive?".

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Micah P. Hinson

Micah P. Hinson is a singer/songwriter from Abilene, Texas with a warm, husky voice. His music has an americana/alternative country slant, with hints of gospel and blues. Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, his first real album, was produced in 2004 by The Earlies, Micah's friends, collaborators and sometimes tour buddies (where they play as his backing band). In 2005, his earlier 4-track recordings were produced and released properly as an album under the title The Baby & The Satellite. Micah has toured with and opened for artists such as Will Oldham, Iron & Wine, David Gray and Calexico.

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Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

<a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Will+Oldham" class="bbcode_artist">Will Oldham</a> (born 24 December 1970, Louisville, Kentucky) is an American <a href="http://www.last.fm/tag/singer-songwriter" class="bbcode_tag" rel="tag">singer-songwriter</a>, actor, and musician. His music is often (perhaps inappropriately) placed under the genre of "<a href="http://www.last.fm/tag/alt-country" class="bbcode_tag" rel="tag">alt-country</a>". Oldham has recorded under many names, including <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Palace" class="bbcode_artist">Palace</a>, <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Palace+Music" class="bbcode_artist">Palace Music</a>, <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Palace+Brothers" class="bbcode_artist">Palace Brothers</a>, and <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/Bonnie+Billy" class="bbcode_artist">Bonnie Billy</a>. He often plays and records with other musicians, including <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/David+Pajo" class="bbcode_artist">David Pajo</a> and his brothers Ned and Paul Oldham, but is generally the chief creator of the music.

Dwight Yoakam

Purveyor of the <a href="http://www.last.fm/tag/bakersfield%20sound" class="bbcode_tag" rel="tag">bakersfield sound</a>, country singer-songwriter Dwight Yoakam grew up in Columbus, Ohio before first heading to Nashville and eventually west to Los Angeles, and bought a place in Bakersfield, CA near his idol & mentor <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Buck+Owens" class="bbcode_artist">Buck Owens</a>. Active as a recording artist since the early 1980s, Yoakam has appeared in films, on over thirty charting singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and a plethora of albums and compilations selling well in excess of 20 million units worldwide.

Kinky Friedman

Richard S. "Kinky" Friedman (born October 31 or November 1, 1944) is an American singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician and former columnist for Texas Monthly who styles himself in the mold of popular American satirists Will Rogers and Mark Twain. He was one of two independent candidates in the 2006 election for the office of Governor of Texas. Receiving 12.6% of the vote, Friedman placed fourth in the five-person race.

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Frank Fairfield

Fairfield, a street musician who plays banjo, fiddle, and guitar and sings traditional folk songs as you would imagine they were sung when they were first written, is only just getting used to the idea of playing music venues alongside rock musicians. He is also an avid collector of 78 rpm recordings of American folk and mountain music and is working on plans to build his own spring motor gramophones.

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Michelle Shocked

Michelle Shocked is a traveller, a troubadour, a 'picker-poet', as they say in Texas. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony walkman. Released in England as ‘The Texas Campfire Tapes’ without Shocked’s authority, its success abroad enticed Mercury Records to offer the newcomer a recording contract.

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Chris Altmann

Writing a concise biography of Chris Altmann is hard. It’s hard to pin him down. Perhaps “Multi-instrumentalist” is the most fitting description, but that doesn’t allow for his other artistic facets; he’s also a songwriter, a performer, a band leader, a collaborator, and a session musician. “Multi-talented” may be a better depiction. Altmann has been fascinated with music since he was old enough to reach the keys on a piano.

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Hugo Race

Melbourne-born multi-instrumentalist, producer, performer and songwriter Hugo Race is an eclectic and prolific artist who has lived and worked in the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy since 1988. He was a founding member and powerful transient element of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds (1983), with whom he started working in the terminal stages of the legendary Birthday Party (he appears on five cds of the Seed's catalogue). In Melbourne he founded the Wreckery (1985) who went on to become on of Australia's seminal cult bands of the 80s, releasing with the White, Rampant, and Citadel labels.