Linda Martell was the first African-American woman to make the country charts and to appear at the Grand Ole Opry, and helped lay the groundwork for future artists of color in the genre. Despite multiple TV appearances, a dozen appearances at the Opry, and some big hits - including "Color Him Father", "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" and "Bad Case of the Blues" - her 1970 debut album, Color Me Country, would also be her last. Now the album is being remastered for its first vinyl pressing in over half a century. Org Music’s reissue was mastered by Dave Gardner at Infrasonic Mastering and pressed on color vinyl at Furnace Record Pressing, exclusively for Record Store Day 2022.

1 Bad Case Of The Blues
2 San Francisco Is A Lonely Town
3 The Wedding Cake
4 Tender Leaves Of Love
5 I Almost Called Your Name
6 Color Him Father
7 There Never Was A Time
8 You're Crying Boy, Crying
9 Old Letter Song
10 Then I'll Be Over You
11 Before The Next Teardrop Falls

2LP set with 28 golden period classic hits including all his signature tunes in a fully authorized, high quality package

Bronco is the new album from country artist and songwriter Orville Peck. A consummate storyteller, the country rock inspired Bronco plays upon the horse theme so often found in Orville’s work, but this time with an exploration of freedom, breaking free from that which binds us and all that is wild and untamed. Bronco builds upon and follows Peck’s previous album Pony and EP Show Pony, which explored themes of love, loss and loneliness but advances the story arc in a bolder, newer and warmer trajectory.

“This is my most impassioned and authentic album to date,” says Peck. “I was inspired by country rock, 60s & 70s psychedelic, California and even bluegrass with everything being anchored in country. Bronco is all about being unrestrained and the culmination of a year of touring, writing in isolation and going through and ultimately emerging from a challenging personal time.”

One of the top emerging artists across all genres of music, Billy Strings has made his most ambitious album to date with Renewal, a 16-song collection that effortlessly positions him as a singular talent—one who reveres the history of the acoustic music that inspired him, while pushing it forward into new spaces and audiences through his incredible live shows.

Serving as a reflection of Strings’ diverse musical influences, Renewal reaches well beyond bluegrass with elements of heavy metal, jam bands, psychedelic music and classic rock—even though it’s still primarily an acoustic record. The album follows his Grammy Award-winning project, Home, as well as industry recognition ranging from Pollstar’s Breakthrough Artist of the Pandemic to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year and New Artist of the Year.

“I’ve learned, you’ve just got to let the song do its thing,” shares Strings. “So that’s what I try to do—write songs and let them come out however they do.”

In The Country is Furay’s 9th solo album, standing apart from his collaborations with groundbreaking groups Buffalo Springfield and Poco.

1. Somebody Like You
2. I Hope You Dance
3.Take Me Home, Country Roads
4. She Don't Know She's Beautiful
5. Your Love Amazes Me
6. I'm In A Hurry (And Don't Know Why)
1. Lonesome Town
2. Walkin' In Memphis
3. I'm Already There
4. The River
5. In This Life
6. Chalk

Hot on the heels of her recent 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards win for Entertainer of the Year, Miranda Lambert is set to release "Palomino," her ninth solo album, on April 29, 2022.

During a recent interview with Billboard, Lambert gave an update on the progress of her much-anticipated upcoming album, which was mostly penned at her Tennessee farm.

Lambert -- who is now the most-awarded artist in ACM history -- has already released the Jesse Frasure co-written single "If I Was A Cowboy" and the just-premiered, low-key, 70s rock-tinged "Strange" (featuring Dick and Hemby as writers) from the new project. "Palomino"'s other reported influences include acts like Little Feat, Bruce Hornsby, the Range and Emmylou Harris.

The album includes a cover of Mick Jagger's 1993 solo album title single "Wandering Spirit," plus an album track entitled "Music City Queen," which features backing vocals from pop icons the B-52s.

Her first single off the project, "If I Was A Cowboy," is just a "sneak peek" for what's on the horizon for Lambert. "I've got some stuff coming out that is from a really creative time," she said.

MIRANDA LAMBERT / PALOMINO

'Lil G.L. Presents: Jukebox Charley' is the 4th installment in Charley Crockett's 'Lil G.L. Presents' series of releases, which focus on heartfelt renditions of songs from some of Charley's biggest musical influences. This newest cover record is packed with songs originally written by greats such as Tom T. Hall, Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck, George Jones and more. Look out for Charley Crockett in your local independent record store.

Golden Hour follows the massive success of Kacey’s critically-acclaimed albums Same Trailer Different Park, Pageant Material and A Very Kacey Christmas. Both Same Trailer Different Park and Pageant Material debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, with Kacey becoming the first solo female in 5 years to top the chart with a rookie release and only the seventh to do so in Nielsen SoundScan’s 22-year history. Kacey has won 2 Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Best Country Song (“Merry Go ‘Round”), 2 CMA Awards for “New Artist of the Year” and “Song of the Year” (“Follow Your Arrow”), and an ACM Award for Album of the Year.

Limited 180gm solid red virgin vinyl LP pressing. Includes four bonus tracks. Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs is an album released by Marty Robbins on the Columbia Records label in September 1959, peaking at #6 on the U.S. pop albums chart. It was recorded in a single eight-hour session on April 7, 1959. The album is perhaps best known for Robbins' most successful single, "El Paso", a major hit on both the country and pop music charts. It reached #1 in both charts at the start of 1960 and won the Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording the following year.

Lyle Lovett returns with his first new album in over 10 years,“12th of June”, due out on Verve Records May 13th, 2022. The album is a fantastic and eclectic collection of new original songs and beloved interpretations that will please existing fans as well as invite new ones. Immaculately recorded, it highlights the dynamics of Lyle and his Large Band– and their singular ability to shift from one genre to the next with uncanny grace and ability.  From beautiful acoustic ballads to swinging big band numbers, this record will remind listeners why Lyle is national musical treasure.

Hank Williams, Jr.’s sound has always been built on the blues, and his latest album, Rich White Honky Blues, is a sonic testimony to that. The project came together over three hot days in Nashville, recorded live with the finest blues session players in the country at producer Dan Auerbach’s legendary studio, Easy Eye Sound. Never one to rest on his laurels, even after 56 studio albums, the acclaimed Country Music Hall of Fame member is still finding new creative ground to explore.

After 10 years in Nashville, 2 No. 1 Country albums and several hundred thousand miles playing shows, Aaron Lewis recognizes the part of America that no one is speaking to – or for. FRAYED AT BOTH ENDS is his measure of the wages of being a grown-up in today’s world, an American in a nation torn apart and a man seeking love and redemption in the words of his songs.

LP Packaging: 1 Red LP & 1 Blue LP.

Country/Bluegrass album, Run, Rose, Run that will be released along with a novel co-written with the famed author, James Patterson, sharing the title Run Rose Run. The 12 songs were inspired by the book storyline and feature Country and Bluegrass artists; Joe Nichols, Rhonda Vincent, The Issacs, and Dailey & Vincent. Dolly & James will be doing book and album promotions together - presenting a unique co-marketing opportunity.

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno ,California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title: MY KID BUKKA GOT A CHARLIE MCCARTHY DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR WHEN HE MADE UP HIS MIND HE WAS GOING TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST. HE IMMEDIATELY PAINTED IT UP TO LOOK LIKE A VAMPIRE ... AND I JUST AS IMMEDIATELY PUT ONA PAIR OF JO HARVEY'S SUNGLASSES AND THE SLEAZIEST JACKET I COULD FIND (western slime) AND SAT FOR FAMILY PHOTOS ... ANYWAY, I BLEW RINGS OF SMOKE ON THE DUMMY AND BUKKA SAID I WAS SMOKIN THE DUMMY. I GUESS IT RANG SOME KIND OF DEMENTED BELL ...

Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of whichAllen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.”

Recorded at Caldwell Studios in Allen’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas during the summer of 1980, exactly two years after his masterpiece Lubbock (on everything) (released in 1979) manifested in the same jury-rigged room, the feral follow-up is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor. It’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. This was by design. The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory.

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers—co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie—and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume—he was deaf in one ear from a near-fatal car accident—were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.)

Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted obsessions—especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch—and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace. In an echo of “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” which opens Lubbock (on everything), “The Heart of California (for Lowell George),” another driving song and the first track of Dummy, is dedicated to Terry’s recently departed friend, the leader of Little Feat, who covered Allen’s “New Delhi Freight Train” before he died.

As on Lubbock, many other songs are older, culled from a decade and a half of songbooks, demos, and work tapes. Allen wrote “RedBird,” a deceptively simple ditty that combines two longstanding fascinations—New Orleans and bird symbolism—as an art student in L.A. in 1964 and performed it onShindig! the following year. He considered it his first “real” song worth keeping, and it rates as the personal favorite of many of his oldest friends, including Bruce Nauman. “Cocaine Cowboy,” composed in 1968, lent its title to a 1974play by Allen’s colleague George Lewis, starring Terry’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey and featuring his own dada-inspired costume designs, including a giant Gogolesque ambulatory nose wearing a cowboy hat. “Roll Truck Roll” and “The Night Cafe,” a diptych of automotive dramas, with counterpoint perspectives on the labor cultures of trucking and food service, both date to 1969. (During this era, Allen was a great enthusiast and denizen of diners, particularly Denny’s, and Jo Harvey wrote and performed a play called Counter Angel, based on her oral histories with truck stop waitresses.) The glowering, bruised 1975 rodeo song “Helena Montana” was inspired by his friend Dave Hickey’s fine rodeo number “Calgary Snow” and Terry’s impending participation in The Great American Rodeo exhibition at Forth Worth Art Museum the following year.

The other four songs, like the aforementioned “The Heart of California,” were of more recent vintage. One of only two covers in Allen’s catalog (the other is David Byrne’s “Buck Naked”), “Whatever Happened to Jesus (and Maybeline)?” interpolates Chuck Berry’s automotive lament within a skewed gospel song of Allen’s own devising, a characteristic imbrication of sacred and profane gestures.Allen completed the furiously frayed album closer “The Lubbock Tornado (I don’t know),” about the devastating 1970 tornado (still a painful local memory ten years later), in a hot Texas Tech practice room during the recording sessions. It takes the American vernacular tradition of disaster ballads into sinister and hilarious spaces, implicating governmental, religious, and alien conspiracies—including the Lubbock Lights—as possible meteorological motivations. In 1980, as in 2022, we can rationalize any calamity with conspiracy theories.In other words, this is deathless American music. Play it again.

Hank Williams, Jr.’s sound has always been built on the blues, and his latest album, Rich White Honky Blues, is a sonic testimony to that. The project came together over three hot days in Nashville, recorded live with the finest blues session players in the country at producer Dan Auerbach’s legendary studio, Easy Eye Sound. Never one to rest on his laurels, even after 56 studio albums, the acclaimed Country Music Hall of Fame member is still finding new creative ground to explore.

Limited 180gm audiophile vinyl LP pressing including insert. The Highwaymen were a country music super-group composed of four of the biggest outlaw country artists: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. The band was active as a group between 1985 and 1995. In 1984, Glen Campbell first played the song 'Highwayman' for Johnny Cash. The four were all together in Switzerland doing a television special and decided that they should do a project together. While the four were recording their first album, Marty Stuart again played the song for Cash, saying it would be perfect for them - four verses, four souls and four of them. Campbell then played the song and the quartet had the name for their new super-group The Highwaymen, the name of their first album, 'Highwayman', and the name of their first single. The four thought it was a perfect name for them because they were always on the road and all four had the image of being outlaws in country music. Both the album and the single eventually reached the top spot in the country music charts. Their remake of Guy Clark's 'Desperados Waiting for a Train' reached the Top 20.

Since 1970, when they met in Allen’s studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York-centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves—brothers in blood—and Hickey’s wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery of Bloodlines, the album Terry released in June of that year. Dave stood among the chorus of singers on the reprise of the title track that ends the record. Terry reprised the album cover concept, a detail of a painting of Jesus carrying a lamb that he found in the gutter outside a Lubbock botánica and manipulated, for Dave’s 1989 collection of youthful short stories, Prior Convictions—but with Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 bloody-bathtub painting “The Death of Marat” as a replacement savior. Hickey wrote the tour de force catalog essay for Allen’s 1983 solo exhibition Rooms and Stories, which featured, two months before the release of Bloodlines, the premiere of his theater piece Bleeder. Finally, there’s Hickey’s sardonic quip about the dim commercial prospects of Bloodlines. Buckets of blood and ink were spilled.

Hickey’s commercial doubts notwithstanding, critical recognition was not in short demand. In a 1984 review of Bloodlines, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen “one of the most compelling American songwriters working today ... making the most unique art-pop of our time,” elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allen’s records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following—they weren’t easy to find in those days, so sometimes they existed only as a words-in-mouth—that began among fellow artists and within the rarefied air of the art world, and then, following the 1979 release of Lubbock (on everything), circulated farther afield, among musicians and fans of “outlaw country,” a loose (in all ways) sub genre and scene named in part for Hickey’s 1974 essay “In Defense of the Telecaster Cowboy Outlaws.” Allen’s early audiences included an outsized contingent of potters and bikers, due, respectively, to enthusiastic ceramicist friends and an unexpected endorsement of Smokin the Dummy (1980) in Easy riders magazine. The Rooms and Stories opening reception at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art was packed with leather-clad bikers.

On his manifold fourth album, Allen contemplates kinship—the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society—with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines, which compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical, is itself kin to its predecessor Smokin the Dummy (chronologically and in terms of its Panhandle Mystery Band personnel and its wide-ranging subjects) and to its descendant, 1993’s The Silent Majority (Terry Allen’s Greatest Missed Hits) (which similarly anthologizes stray and orphan songs). Recorded piecemeal at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, in sessions spanning August 1982 through January 1983, Terry self-released it, like all his previous records, on his own Fate Records imprint. Despite his frustration with the protracted timeline and some anxiety about the correspondingly higher budget, the production onBloodlines—courtesy, once again, of master guitarist Lloyd Maines—is slicker, cleaner, and more dynamic than prior efforts, and it reached a broader audience than ever before. UK label Making Waves reissued it in 1985, facilitating semi-reliable European distribution for the first time as well as a 1986 UK tour, on which the great BJ Cole filled in for Lloyd on pedal steel.

Allen wrote two songs as themes for plays: the Pasadena idyll “Oh What a Dangerous Life” for Joan Hotchkiss’s 1982 play Bissie at the Baths and the gospel-coughing hymn “Hally Lou” for his wife and collaborator Jo Harvey Allen’s 1983 performance piece of the same name, in which she plays the titular revival preacher. Bloodlines is the first of several albums to revisit selections from Terry’s 1975 debutJuarez with full-band arrangements: a comic take on “Cantina Carlotta” that inhabits the tone-deaf tourist’s perspective of the hapless narrator, and a terrifying road-rage, burnt-rubber rendition of “There Oughta Be a Law About Sunny Southern California ”featuring Jesse Taylor, in his final Panhandle Mystery Band recording, on “asphalt vendetta guitar” (Maines Brothers guitarist Cary Banks deftly handles lead guitar elsewhere). The irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely), in which Jesus steals the narrator’s car and beer for a joyride to the hereafter, remains a fan favorite.Terry wrote the final verses in a Texas Tech practice room the day they recorded it. “Manhattan Bluebird,” a surprisingly earnest (and unexpectedly moving) lament for the cultural insularity and provincialism of a New Yorker deluded by her own alleged cosmopolitanism, boasts one of Allen’s most beautiful minor-key melodies. On tour in Belfast in 1996, Allen’s tour mates feared “Our land,” a thinly veiled satire of the IRA’s hypocrisy amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland, would incite a riot and urged him not to play it. Of course, he didn’t listen.

Lloyd Maines wept when Terry first played him the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape, which sounds as ancient and eternal as a psalm. But that didn’t stop Lloyd from complaining about having too large a chorus on the album-closing extended version (he’s a notorious stickler for tuning and pitch). Twenty-five friends and family members packed the studio that day, including Dave Hickey, Joe and Sharon Ely, and Stubb of BBQ fame. “Bloodlines II” represents the recorded debuts of the Allens’ sons Bukka and Bale as well as Lloyd’s eight-year-old daughter Natalie Maines, later of the (Dixie) Chicks—a true testament to the power of blood. In 1998 Lucinda Williams covered it in a spookily spare version on Allen’s soundtrack for Jane Anderson’s film Baby Dance, starring Laura Dern and Stockard Channing. As the credits roll, the river runs through the mountains, under the moonlight. Hear the song.

Songs My Friends Wrote is an album I’ve been threatening to make for years. It’s a bunch of tracks that are my versions of a bunch of…songs my friends wrote. I’m fortunate to count a lot of world class songwriters as good pals and I wanted to shine a little light on some of my favourite examples of their work. In most cases I’ve picked relatively obscure songs that have always spoken to me, even though many of them won’t be so familiar to people. There’s a pretty good chance of a Volume Two, Three and Four eventually, because there were a lot of friends and a lot of songs to choose from. The best part about recording all these tunes was that they reminded me of all the people who I haven’t been able to hang out with for the past two years because of the plague we’ve all been dealing with. All of these tunes bring a smile to my face and I hope they do the same for you. - Corb Lund

Maren Morris is releasing her new album, Humble Quest on 25th March via Sony Nashville. The album features lead single, `Circles Around This Town' and 10 other songs from the Grammy-winning superstar.

She began writing the songs on Humble Quest at the beginning of the pandemic as a series of major life changes unfolded-new motherhood, an upended career, the death of beloved friend and collaborator Michael Busbee and more, further compounded by the lockdown.

Maren found herself reckoning with humility in ways she'd never imagined, as she thought about how the goal of appearing humble puts artists - especially women - in a box with unrealistic demands to keep them small.

It's Morris' first studio album since the release of her 2019 album, Girl.

MAREN MORRIS / HUMBLE QUEST

Charley Crockett's been running nearly his entire life, but with the title track to his sixth album, the Texas songwriter looks back at where he came from. "The Valley" chronicles his hard upbringing on the south Texas border, but it also distills the essence of Crockett's fierce and restless independence. Recorded just a week before he went under the knife for life-saving open heart surgery in January, the album stirs with an introspection and urgency to tell his story. It's a story of an artist searching for his place in the world, absorbing the sounds of the country; it's a story of exile and promise.

Recorded over the course of two nights in 1974, just a few months after Phases and Stages was released, these early concerts by the newly-minted Willie Nelson Family Band were meant to capture the sound and feel of the burgeoning Outlaw Country scene in Austin, TX. Produced by Jerry Wexler, the album was scrapped at the time and was only released on CD in 1992 and in this complete form in 2006 on the The Complete Atlantic Sessions. The set captures a rising star twelve years in the making, whose fame and fortune lurked just around the corner.
This Record Store Day release marks its first time on vinyl.