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2 weeks ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Maurice Tani |Kate Koenig |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Scott Nygaard
Jimmie Rodgers’ influence spans country, blues, and early rock ’n’ roll, earning him a place in multiple halls of fame. With a career that lasted just five years before his death from tuberculosis in 1933, Rodgers left an indelible mark on American music. “Waiting for a Train” became a hit in 1929, just as the Wall Street crash ushered in the Great Depression.
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2 months ago | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Maurice Tani
When I hear “Singin’ in the Rain,” the image that springs to mind is Gene Kelly’s rain-soaked dance in the iconic scene from the 1952 film of the same name. But the song itself dates back to the 1920s and has remained a beloved standard ever since. Written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, “Singin’ in the Rain” premiered on Broadway in The Hollywood Music Box Revue in 1929.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Peter Penhallow |Scott Nygaard |Adam Perlmutter |Maurice Tani
“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” is a standard in bluegrass circles today, but the song predates the genre. Like many classic folk songs, its origins are murky, with some verses appearing to be mashups of even older traditional folk songs. The first popular recording was made in 1925 by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and it sold over 100,000 copies—a huge number at the time.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Kate Koenig |Adam Perlmutter |Jontavious Willis |Maurice Tani
“Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” was written in 1928 by Cole Porter for his Broadway musical Paris. With its mildly risqué, bordering-on-absurd lyrics, the song is a lighthearted mash-up of clever wordplay and double entendre. It’s also one of those numbers that has lent itself to additional topical verses over the years—a quick search will unearth a dozen additional verses beyond the basic set I’m using here.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers |Maurice Tani
One of the standout tracks on Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, the latest release by the seven-time Grammy winner, is “Too Good to Be True,” an intimate ballad about opening up to a new relationship. Like most of the album, this song is built on layers of acoustic guitar, with fingerstyle parts that are so closely entwined it’s often hard to pick out the individual instruments.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Steve Baughman |Adam Perlmutter |Maurice Tani |Lisa Grossman Liu
The beloved standard “Sweet Georgia Brown” was written in 1925 by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard, with lyrics by Kenneth Casey. The inspiration for the song reportedly struck when Bernie met a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, Dr. George Thaddeus Brown, in New York City. Brown mentioned that the Georgia General Assembly declared his daughter, who had been born in 1911, should be named Georgia after the state.
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Sep 1, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |David Hamburger |Maurice Tani
I first heard “In the Jailhouse Now” on the oldies station when I was a kid but didn’t start playing it until getting into old country as a working musician in the ’90s. Webb Pierce’s monster hit version from 1955—which spent 21 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart—was a staple of every retro honky-tonk band with a back line of old tube amps and a closet full of vintage cowboy shirts and cuffed jeans.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Maurice Tani |Adam Perlmutter |Kate Koenig
“Green, Green Rocky Road” is a traditional song that originated in the American South as a popular children’s game tune, nicely documented by folklorist Harold Courlander in a recording he made in the early 1950s in rural Alabama. The song has seen many excellent interpretations over the years, by the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Arlo Guthrie, Elizabeth Mitchell, Van Morrison, and others.
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Jul 14, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Sean McGowan |Sean Mcgowan |Maurice Tani
Laurence Juber, a fingerstyle master and one-time lead guitarist for Paul McCartney and Wings, has recorded many Beatles songs arranged for solo acoustic guitar over the last 25 years—five albums’ worth, to be exact. But what makes his latest effort, A Day in My Life, so special is that he recorded it in one day last August in London’s Abbey Road Studio 2, where the Fab Four had created the bulk of their catalog decades before.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
acousticguitar.com | Adam Perlmutter |Maurice Tani |Danny Carnahan
Mississippi John Hurt (1893–1966) was one of the great country blues singer-songwriters, and a superb, subtly eccentric guitarist whose work was teeming with colorful details. One of his most well-known recordings, “I’m Satisfied,” related to the Memphis Jug Band piece “You May Leave, But This Will Bring You Back,” offers a glimpse into what made his accompaniment work so interesting.
