All Time Favorites

This category can only be “Editor’s Choice.” An attempt to recognize those artists that have continued to build their fan base over an entire career and have carved out a special place for this web site to roam. It is surely a matter of taste, who may qualify as ones favorites. We will continue to add musicians and authors to this tab.

don and marti
All Time Favorites Art/Artists Music

Marti Jones & Don Dixon

Marti Jones Art

Don Dixon

Marti Jones & Don Dixon have been performing together, off and on, for over twenty years. This longtime partnership has resulted in an intimate stage rapport as well as the seamless blending of two of the most distinct voices around today. With over two hundred songs in their collective recorded catalogue, you never know quite what to expect when they hit the stage, but rest assured their performance will feature thoughtful lyrics and heart-felt singing.

Don Dixon has devoted his entire life to the popular song. Whether working as a singer, songwriter, musician or producer, he has always tried to capture the essence of his life in the moment.

He began playing and recording in his mid-teens, co-founding ARROGANCE, a band that helped forge the North Carolina scene which brought the world Let’s Active and The dBs, along with dozens of other bands that followed in their wake. Dixon went solo in 1983 and has released nine cds. He is currently at work on a new recording with his long-time touring band, Jamie Hoover and Jim Brock. After twenty years, Jamie has named the group “Don Dixon & the Jump Rabbits”. The new platter is called “The Nu-Look” and is due in May 2008.

Dixon’s writing, production and session credits include astroPuppees, Baby Shaker, Richard Barone, Jim Brock, Mark Bryan, Kim Carnes, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Caitlin Cary, Joe Cocker, The Connells, Counting Crows, Marshall Crenshaw, Pat DiNizio, The Edison Project, Fetchin Bones, GB Leighton, The Golden Palominos, Guadalcanal Diary, Hootie and the Blowfish, In Tua Nua, Marti Jones, Tommy Keene, Let’s Active, James McMurtry, Moxy Fruvous, REM, The Red Clay Ramblers, The Smithereens, Snagglepuss, Ronnie Spector, The Spongetones, Chris Stamey, Matthew Sweet, The X-Teens and dozens more.

nick lowe
All Time Favorites Music

Nick Lowe

Nicholas “Nick” Drain Lowe, is an English singer-songwriter, musician and producer. A noted figure in power pop and new wave, Lowe has recorded a string of well-reviewed solo albums. Along with vocals, Lowe plays guitar, bass guitar, piano and harmonica. Wikipedia

Nick Lowe has made his mark as a producer (Elvis Costello-Graham Parker-Pretenders-The Damned), songwriter of at least three songs you know by heart, short-lived career as a pop star, and a lengthy term as a musicians’ musician. But in his current ‘second act’ as a silver-haired, tender-hearted but sharp-tongued singer-songwriter, he has no equal.

Starting with 1995′s ‘The Impossible Bird’ through to 2011′s ‘The Old Magic,’ Nick has turned out a fantastic string of albums, each one devised in his West London home, and recorded with a core of musicians who possess the same veteran savvy. Lowe brings wit and understated excellence to every performance, leading Ben Ratliff of the New York Times to describe his live show as “elegant and nearly devastating.”

richard thompson
All Time Favorites Music

Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He made his début as a recording artist as a member of Fairport Convention in September 1967. He continues to write and record new material regularly and frequently performs live at venues throughout the world. Wikipedia

toussaint
All Time Favorites Music

Allen Toussaint

in memorium

Artist Biography by Steve Huey

Producer, songwriter, arranger, session pianist, solo artist — Allen Toussaint wore all these hats over the course of his lengthy and prolific career, and his behind-the-scenes work alone would have been enough to make him a legend of New Orleans R&B. Thanks to his work with numerous other artists, Toussaintbore an enormous amount of responsibility for the sound of R&B in the Crescent City from the ’60s on into the ’70s. His productions kept with the times, moving from rollicking, earthy soul in the ’60s to gritty, rambunctious funk in the ’70s. As a composer, Toussaint proved himself a consistent hitmaker, penning more than a few gems that have since become R&B standards and been covered by countless artists working in many different styles. In keeping with that across-the-board appeal, Toussaint worked in some supporting capacity for a wide variety of rock and blues legends, particularly from the ’70s on. On top of all that, Toussaint waxed his own records from time to time, enjoying a creative peak in the ’70s with several albums that highlighted his laid-back vocals and elegantly funky piano work. Even if he wasn’t always the most visible figure, Toussaint‘s contributions to New Orleans music — and to rock & roll in general — were such that he earned induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

crumley
All Time Favorites Books/Authors

James Crumley

in memorium

Crumley was the quintessential novelist for post Vietnam War America. His disillusion was equal to his romantic streak, the both of them stoked by abundant appetites and consumption of just about every substance under the sun. He was a slumming poet in the vein of his icon, Chandler, and a consummate writer’s writer, capable of more feeling and more beauty in a sentence than many authors could fit into a book. Ask your favorite crime writer for a list of their most admired books and the odds are you’ll find The Last Good Kiss or some other adventure from the C.W. Sughrue or Milo Milodragovitch series among them.

(Crimereads)

  • A special crime novel
  • A look at Vietnam
jesse winchester
All Time Favorites Little Known Heroes Music

Jesse Winchester

in memoriam

Jesse Winchester, the esteemed singer-songwriter who became a symbol of the anti-war movement when he moved to Canada to escape the draft in the Sixties, died April 11th, 2014, from bladder cancer. Winchester, who was living in Virginia when he died, was 69.

While never as well known as peers like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, Winchester wrote some of the defining singer-songwriter tracks of the seventies — evocations of American and Southern life like “Yankee Lady,” “Biloxi,” “Mississippi You’re on My Mind” and “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” that ached with feelings of loss for the country he decided he had to leave. The songs gained him a cult following and critical respect, and were covered by everyone from George Strait to Tim Hardin. Winchester was considered such a formidable songwriter that a 2012 tribute album, Quiet About It, featured versions of his songs by Taylor, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Buffett, Rosanne Cash, Lucinda Williams, and Vince Gill, among others. 

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1944, Winchester started playing music in Memphis, where his family later relocated. In 1967, he received a draft induction letter, but instead of showing up, he took a plane to Montreal. “I was so offended by someone’s coming up to me and presuming to tell me who I should kill and what my life was worth,” he told Rolling Stone in 1977. He arrived in Canada with only $300 and no connections, but settled into a new life, joining a local band and finally writing his own material. (Rolling Stone)

RIP Jesse

 

dr john
All Time Favorites Music

Dr. John

in memoriam

Dr. John, Rock N Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 6 time Grammy winner, songwriter, composer, producer and performer, created a unique blend of music which carried his hometown New Orleans at its heart, as it was always in his heart.

jim harrison
All Time Favorites Books/Authors

Jim Harrison

in memoriam

Poet and novelist Jim Harrison spent much of his life in Michigan on a farm near where he was born, as well as Montana and Arizona. His connection to rural landscapes was evident in his free-verse, imagistic poetry, which often explores human and animal drives set against an unforgiving natural world. Noting the poetry’s relation to Hemingway’s prose style in a review of Harrison’s Selected & New Poems 1961–1981, poet and critic Richard Tillinghast declared in the New York Times that “Mr. Harrison has few equals as a writer on outdoor life, the traditional heritage and proving ground of the American male.” 

Harrison earned a BA and MA at Michigan State University, and he taught briefly at SUNY Stony Brook. After the publication of his first collection of poetry, Plain Song (1965), he returned to Michigan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and laborer until he began to earn a living from his writing.

Harrison published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Livingston Suite (2005), Saving Daylight (2006), In Search of Small Gods (2009), Songs of Unreason (2011), and Dead Man’s Float (2016). He was also well known as a fiction writer, publishing numerous novels and collections. His novel Legends of the Fall (1979) received considerable critical acclaim and was made into a 1995 feature film. Harrison wrote several screenplays for Warner Bros. and other studios. He served as poetry editor of The Nation and coeditor of Sumac. He wrote a food column, “The Raw and the Cooked,” for Esquire magazine, and his collection of essays, Just Before Dark (1991), includes some of his food writing along with literary and nature essays. Harrison died in 2016.

escovedo
All Time Favorites Little Known Heroes Music

Alejandro Escovedo

“Simply one of the finest singer-songwriters of his generation, Alejandro Escovedo’s critical cachet has always outstripped his name recognition and commercial impact.” — Slant

honey dogs
All Time Favorites Little Known Heroes Music

Honeydogs

Brothers Noah and Adam Levy were already veterans of the Minneapolis rock scene when they formed The Honeydogs in 1994. Elder brother Adam spun his favorite country, soul and rock influences into a vintage-sounding batch of songs on the band’s eponymous 1995 debut featuring bassist Trent Norton. Noah took time off to record and tour with Golden Smog featuring members of The Jayhawks, Wilco, Their second outing, featuring added guitarist Tommy Borscheid, Everything I Bet You (1996) further honed the band’s merging of country and rock, sounding like a Flying Burrito Brothers/Beatles/Clash hybrid. The band toured extensively and secured a major label deal with Mercury Records–leading to their first commercial release, Seen A Ghost (1997 )

Now, in the mid-2020s, a new Honeydogs album is in the works, while for the last five years, Adam Levy has joined forces with two lovely voices to form Turn Turn Turn and tour around the country when they venture from their hometown Minneapolis.

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