4/30/2024 0 Comments He's got a ticket to ride songA British folk magazine called it “maybe the most important Americana album of all time,” and if it’s not, well, it’s hard to imagine one that covers more ground. Annie Get Your Gun it ain’t-more like “ Les Misérables with cowboy hats,” according to its author. Roscrae tells a heartbreaking immigrant story that stretches from Ireland to Molokai, with most of the action on the blood-soaked Western frontier. I set aside the meat of a Saturday morning to listen to it all the way through-two hours and change-and by the end I knew Markus was right: I’d never heard a recording like it in terms of scope and ambition. A two-disc folk opera called The Rose of Roscrae, it came complete with an 80-page program guide and libretto. Russell’s record label sent me the new CD, and it wasn’t just album number 30-something and rising. “Gallo del Cielo” is a rollicking seven-minute ballad (corrido, more precisely) about a fighting rooster, which has earned admiration from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Immedi-ately after connecting with Russell, it clicked that he’d written a standout track on my favorite Ely album. Russell co-produced it with Dave Alvin, originally of the Blasters, and it featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, and Joe Ely, of the Flatlanders. He first came to my attention as the singer of the first track on Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Merle Haggard, which came out in 1994 and is considered a landmark album of the Americana genre for the way it linked a trad-country workingman’s hero like the Hag to a generation of singer-songwriters from the eighties roots revival. Given that I used to be the music editor of a big-city newspaper and listen to more Americana than most other styles of music, I’m mildly embarrassed to admit that I knew Russell more by the company he kept than for his own accomplishments. I’d love to do some portraits of him for you. “Tom is a fully loaded, and cocked, super artist,” he wrote. “I really feel a part of a new surge in art and music here … or maybe I’m just a Dennis Hopper–DH Lawrence type aching to stir up a good art mess … inviting me to the table might be like inviting Crazy Horse over for Thanksgiving!” This new guy in town was starting to sound promising.There’s nothing like a good art mess, and the town’s off-the-beaten-track music scene could use a boost from a prestige artist with great connections.Īs it happens, Markus is another mutual acquaintance who had moved to town not so long ago, so I emailed him about Russell. “We’re knee deep in new friends and prospects,” he wrote. He replied that his “hacienda” in El Paso was getting surrounded by “too much suburbia” and that he and his wife wanted “some breathing space on the high desert.” Furthermore, he wrote, “I’ve totally written up the border in song and story and paint-so time to move on.” He also mentioned that he knew some local notables like the venerable honky-tonk crooner Bill Hearne, art-ist/musician Terry Allen, and Kurt Markus, “the famed photographer.” “So what brought you to Santa Fe?” I asked. He was politely fishing for coverage in New Mexico Magazine. IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, I received an email from the musician Tom Russell saying he’d gotten my address from a mutual friend in New York who’s an influential radio guy and that he’d recently moved to Santa Fe, had just played a sold-out gig in town, and would be happy to send me a new album he was promoting.
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