country music

Brent Mason has picked for the biggest and best names in country music: Alan Jackson, Willie Nelson, Shania Twain, Brooks & Dunn, Blake Shelton, and George Strait are just a few of the country stars on whose records you can hear Mason’s Fender-on-Fender fretwork. But his solo on “Southbound Train,” the closing track on Travis Tritt’s 2000 record Down the Road I Go, might be his hottest work of all.

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John Bohlinger with his club rig in downtown Nashville on a Monday afternoon.

I've been gigging in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, for over two decades. Here's an inside look at Music City's club scene.

Within Nashville's club scene, there are roughly 100 stages crammed into 40-plus clubs stacked side by side along and around lower Broadway. Every day, these bars run four consecutive, four-hour sets of live music starting at 10 a.m. and ending at 2:30 a.m. One band stumbles off and the next group is up and playing in as little as 15 minutes. The music and chaos never stops.

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S.G. Goodman’s New American Gothic

The Kentuckian singer-songwriter creates her own vision of the rural South in Old Time Feeling, with reverb-drenched guitars, bare-boned arrangements, and an intimate, haunting vocal style that ties the past and present.


Singer, songwriter, and guitarist S.G. Goodman is very much a product of the modern, rural American South. “I could easily portray things in a way that's disrespectful to my community," she explains. “But that's not the story I feel needs to be told." Photo by Meredith Truax

“I really don't think I could find any joy in not being honest with people," declares S.G. Goodman. “That's just the way I choose to go about my music. I try to represent my worldview, and the people in it, as respectfully and honestly as possible."

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