About the Show
Music City Roots
A weekly concert and live radio show presented from The Loveless Cafe Barn in Nashville, TN.
By Craig Havighurst, Music City Roots Producer
A few years ago, inspired by his family history and a love of 20th century French chanson, Eric Brace invited Rory Hoffman to collaborate on what is now the brand new and beautifully wrought album Cartes Postales. These are songs largely collected from between the era of hot jazz in the 1930s and the sophisticated pop of the 1960s. They’re teeming with harmonic complexities yet as relatable and loveable in their melodic integrity as music can be. And this novel concept album and its stellar musicians will be part of Roots bill loaded with notoriety and excellence.
Brace (veteran of Last Train Home and numerous albums and tours with our own Peter Cooper) says he’s had the outlines of the project in his mind for years. His father grew up in France you see. He escaped Paris in 1940 and made it through World War II in southern France as a teenager. He came to American on a Liberty ship to attend college in 1947.
“Really all he brought was his harmonica,” Brace told me this week. “By the time I was born (in ‘60) he had French records and we listened to them along with our Burl Ives and Peter, Paul and Mary records. Those songs and those melodies are so classic – really sophisticated and cosmopolitan and exciting and sexy and romantic. They always stuck with me.”
There could have been no better musical companion than Nashville’s Hoffman, who is uncannily excellent on all the instruments one needs to make this kind of record authentic, including clarinet, accordion, guitar and harmonica. Rory is an MCR alum as a featured artist and sideman, so to have him back with Brace will, I can testify from first hand listening, make a remarkable opening set this week.
I’m just getting into Scott Miller’s brand new album Ladies Auxiliary, so there’s no way I’ll have it in hand and heart by show time because Miller is a writer and artist of layers whose projects reveal their deepest value with familiarity and repeated listening. Though it does feature the wonderful “Someday/Sometime” which he’s played on the show before. And there’s another one that’s been on the Miller set list for years but I guess never recorded (to my surprise) called “Lo Ciento, Spanishburg, WVA.” This one is quintessential Miller, with wry observations about American pathologies that cut to the problem while leaving slivers of hope, or at least heart. If you follow MCR you know Scott’s one of our favorite songwriters and guys. He’s a roots rock hero who made his rep leading the V-Roys from the Knoxville college scene to a Steve Earle-sponsored label deal. Post V-Roys, he’s been a sure-fire good time acoustic performer who’s mellowed in his years of sobriety and his return to the family cattle ranch in Virginia he knew as a boy. He is, in every way, out standing in his field.
Last year during AmericanaFest I chased a feeling that I needed to know the music of Rose Cousins, based on her widespread respect and critical acclaim. So I made my way to the spacious City Winery, where I was rewarded with a pensive, moving performance leavened by Rose’s endearing chat between songs. She performed from a piano and could be heard as an artful cabaret artist, but truly she’s a folk singer at heart, one who will powerfully reach anybody who ever loved Shawn Colvin or Lori McKenna. She’s Canadian by birth and base. Her career got rolling about ten years ago. She’s won a Juno Award and a Canadian Folk Music Award in the best contemporary artist category. NPR Music said of her 2017 release Natural Conclusion that she has “a disarmingly fluid vocal tone and an ability to convey the most internalized emotions — disappointment, grief, resolve, forbearance — without an ounce of fuss.”
And rounding out this week’s roster of magnificence is North Carolina songwriter David Childers. I had to search my memory banks about this guy, and with some assistance from the Google I was reminded I’d very much enjoyed his 1999 CD Hard Time County. But I’d lost track of the artist until this booking and I see that for years he’s been releasing top notch music with the help of Avett Brothers record chief Dolf Ramseur. I also learned that for years, Childers was an attorney who did his music and painting on the side. But now he’s an artist full time, and it appears that his outsider-inspired painting graces the cover of his new Run Skeleton Run album. This should be very pure and vivid.
