About the Artists
Vince Gill
Vincent Grant Gill was born April 12, 1957 in Norman, Okla. His father encouraged him to learn to play guitar and banjo, which he did along with bass, mandolin, dobro and fiddle. While in high school, he performed in the bluegrass band Mountain Smoke, which built a strong local following and opened a concert for Pure Prairie League.
After graduating high school in 1975, Gill moved to Louisville, Ky. to be part of the band Bluegrass Alliance. After a brief time in Ricky Skaggs’s Boone Creek band, Gill moved to Los Angeles and joined Sundance, a bluegrass group fronted by fiddler Byron Berline. In 1979, he joined Pure Prairie League as lead singer and recorded three albums with the band, the first of which yielded the Top Ten pop hit “Let Me Love You Tonight” in 1980. Departing the group in 1981, Gill joined Rodney Crowell’s backing band the Cherry Bombs, where he met and worked with Tony Brown and Emory Gordy Jr., both of whom would later produce many of his future solo albums.
Emmylou Harris
With a career that has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, garnered a remarkable 12 Grammy Awards and stirred music lovers for more than thirty years and counting, Emmylou Harris has been rightfully hailed as a major figure in several of America’s most important musical movements of the past three
decades. A steadfast supporter of roots music and a skilled interpreter of compelling songs, she also has been associated with a diverse and dazzling array of admiring collaborators from Bright Eyes to Tammy Wynette and from Neil Young to Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. Emmylou was inducted into the Country Musc Hall of Fame in April 2008.
Rodney Crowell
Last January Rodney Crowell rented a house in my little town in Montana just to feel the cold. He had been here before, but always in the summertime, when Livingston is a temperate and
sociable outpost for writers and actors and artists on the banks of the Yellowstone River. But as soon as the first blizzard rolls in most of the amateurs sensibly depart for Tucson or Key West. By January, the coldest month, the local population is down to seeds and stems. That’s when Rodney and his
wife, Claudia Church, arrived for a long visit. He wanted to work on his memoirs, now nearly finished, and he wanted to experience a real Montana winter, the kind he’d read about in Ivan Doig’s sweeping novels. The boy from the Houston swamps figured he might learn something new in the frozen north.
Rodney was disappointed when a chinook kicked up from the west and the weather turned mild. Snowdrifts melted into puddles.
Jerry Douglas
A man walks into a diner. He looks familiar with the place but still a little lonely and detached. He sits down and orders, and as he waits he becomes aware of the voices of the
other customers. He listens to those voices, and his expression changes from detachment to attentiveness. The meanings of the words he overhears dwindle away, and the man begins to discern in them instead nonverbal tones and patterns. Phrasing, counterpoint, arpeggios, voices as “instruments” with
distinctive qualities. Finally, for the man who is sitting there alone, the diner’s babble is transformed into a kind of music. He smiles.
Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters
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I have seen the future of hillbilly rock & roll, and its name is The Boxmasters. Conveniently, The Boxmasters just so happen to be the past and present of hillbilly rock & roll too.
In a musical universe where far too many still haven’t found what they’re looking for, lifelong player Billy Bob Thornton has finally happened upon true musical happiness with life as a Boxmaster. “This is what I’ve been searching for since I was a kid,” says this son of Hot Springs, Arkansas of his beloved band of hillbilly brothers.“I grew up as a fan of Frank Zappa and the early Mothers and Captain Beefheart and the Bonzo Dog Band, as well as Cream and Traffic, as well as George Jones and Cash and Buck Owens,” Thornton explains. “So I guess all my life, I’d bounce around country and rock bands. And as much as I like my past records, they never gave me a little of everything I love like this one does. I finally figured out what my style is -- and it’s this.”
Levon Helm
Levon Helm not only stood witness to the birth of rock
& roll; he also participated in bringing it to the world. Then, as a drummer, he gave it his own distinctive backbeat, and as a songwriter and singer he emphasized rock’s southern roots.
Born in 1940 in Elaine, Arkansas, Helm was fourteen when he saw Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley sharing a bill in Helena, Arkansas. The following year, 1955, Helm saw drummer Jimmy Van Eaton play with Jerry Lee Lewis and decided to take up drumming. In 1957 he joined the band of Arkansas rocker Ronnie Hawkins.
Larry Campbell
One of America’s most in-demand musicians, and the 2008 winner of the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award / Instrumentalist, Larry Campbell requires several long lists to adequately describe his talents and
accomplishments.
He is a multi-instrumentalist who has mastered the electric and acoustic guitar, pedal steel guitar, mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, banjo, and cittern. Besides being Bob Dylan’s lead guitarist from 1997 to 2004, he has toured or recorded with Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, B.B. King, K.D. Lang, Cyndi Lauper, and Willie Nelson, among others.