Until about six months ago, when Rodney Crowell’s latest album, Diamonds and Dirt, started cranking out the first of three number-one singles (“It’s Such a Small World,” “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,” and “She’s Crazy for Leaving”), only a small group of liner-note readers and musicians knew who…
Since the death of zydeco king Clifton Chenier a little more than a year ago, the scramble has been on to assume his throne. And when you consider that such famed accordion pumpers as Buckwheat Zydeco, Terrance Simien and the Mallet Playboys, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Twisters, and Good Rockin’…
No, they aren’t all blind, and there are seven of them, not five. Clarence Fountain, the man who founded the Five Blind Boys at Alabama’s Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind back in 1939, patiently explains the current status of one of gospel music’s most revered singing groups. “There…
