Sometimes  I get over enthusiastic. It’s not a trait we Scots excel at usually, but there are times reader, there are days I gush. It usually comes when someone expresses disappointment on my behalf that I’m not available on a Tuesday night to go to football/ gigs/ ballroom dancing/ attend real-life drawing (I made some of these up).

As I slowly let down those seekers of my social attention I confirm that they mustn’t feel in any way sorry for me. I, I tell them, am the happiest cove alive. If my 16 year old me….hell if my 25, 35 or 35 year old me could imagine old-codger me getting to bring in a pile of records and share them with my chums over the airwaves all of these ‘Mes’ would  have clumsily and collectively punched the air.

I remember the summer of 75 so well. I worked in McGill Bros. Sports Department (bottom of the Hiltown, people) where, through my high-end skills in keeping the Tayside public dressed in Adidas T Shirts and convincing them they should spend the Dundee Fortnight in one of our tents, (we sold camping gas and sleeping bags too) I was able to purchase my first real stereo. Record deck by Garrard, Pioneer amp and Wharfedale speakers, thanks for asking.

There wasn’t much left for buying albums but sometimes sacrifices were made and records were bought anyway. On last week’s show one of the albums purchased that summer was played on vinyl – oh the joy. At that point the only people I could play records to were the occasional unsuspecting visitor to my lonely downstairs den. My big sister once got so frustrated at my changing albums over she implored me to keep the record playing. It felt like she was suddenly speaking Klingon. Surely she could see the joy was in picking the tracks and mixing it all up? How wonderful, I imagined, it would be were I able to fade out one song and surreptitiously drop in another from a different record. When I heard the term segue-way I felt my life began a new chapter.

So this Tuesday and as a bonus for me, on Wednesday too, I’ll be in our studio in BBC Scotland playing out the records which most excited me over the last seven days. In fact some of that is not true – I’d have to have a much longer time on air to do that – but I shall try to self edit and bring you the highlights. 

Kenny Rogers then….

And now..

On this week’s show we’ll be celebrating the 80th Birthday of the great Kenny Rogers. We’ll bring you new music from Phosphorescent, Joshua Hedley, our fab new discoveries, Mountain Man and The Nude Party as well as welcome return visits to Maren Morris, Madison Violet and Richmond Fontaine. We’re allowing ourselves a little nostalgia this week too as we celebrate our ten years on air.

So…it’s not that I don’t enjoy special nights, sessions or live concert shows. It’s really just that playing out records over the airwaves is still the best part of this job. Join me if you can. Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland from nine and, for the next few weeks, BBC Radio 2 on Wednesdays at the same time where you can hear my New Tradition.

It’s a summer’s day and I’m listening to Roger Miller. I really can’t complain.

Roger Miller is one of these artists who was swept into our pop consciousness by the random nature of British radio and television. Any one of my age (that’s old, folks) can remember almost everything they ever watched on Top of The Pops. Roger’s performance of King of The Road was one of these ones we never forgot. Later in the sixties there was the joy of hearing his voice as the troubadour in Disney’s own version of Robin Hood. In truth I never really got the ‘Disney’ Roger until I had young children and a pile of Disney VHS tapes. Oh the unknown joys of parenthood.

Later this year we’ll bring a wonderful conversation we recorded a few months ago with Jerry and Gordon Kennedy. Jerry, the man who produced many of Roger’s records and Gordon, his gifted ace guitarist son, have the best collection of Roger Miller stories I’ve heard so far. (*Puts hand on chest...’I’ve had little Jimmy Dickens up to here.*) Roger Miller was one of that great group of writers hanging out at Tootsie’s in the early 60’s which included Harlan Howard and Willie Nelson. Gordon remembers his father changing one of Roger’s B sides to an A on the basis of his brother and he dancing around the living room to the acetate pressing. Music was simpler in these days!

There’s a new album of Roger Miller songs coming out this month and we’ll play you a gorgeous duet featuring two country greats from that record. The album is called King of The Road – a Tribute to Roger Miller. His old friend, Willie Nelson too has a significant anniversary as well as a new album of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra. We’ll give you a little taste of both of these things this Tuesday.

After the excitement of Southern Fried I’m delighted to be in the studio with a pile of old and new records- including some vinyl this week. Beautiful cuts from Tiny Ruins, Cordovas, Sam Morrow, Lee Ann Womack and the man who will be supporting on her visit to Scotland in September, Charlie Worsham. We’ll discover why there’s not one but two albums available from Jim Lauderdale this August and will hear more from that fine Sons of Bill record as a little taster for the band’s visit to Glasgow this coming weekend.

There’s going to be so many good things coming your way on the old AC over the next few months I thought I’d freshen up the Radio Blog too. Hope you like the new look. Always glad of your comments which you can add in. As ever we’ll be live this Tuesday at five past nine and repeated on Friday at 8. You see, it must still be summer. Join me if you can on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

It’s common rock folklore that Graham Nash’s nickname is Willie. I have now spent nearly two hours in the man’s presence and, let me assure you, I’m no nearer calling him Willie. Give me a few more hours and I’ll be no nearer. I say all this as on Tuesday night’s Another Country we will spend some time with Mr Nash as we play out more highlights from Southern Fried Festival in Perth.

At first it seemed an odd typo that had slipped into the schedule for the weekend: ‘Record acoustic session with Graham Nash in Perth Theatre.’ Really? It seemed it was true and what’s more Graham had agreed to perform two of his very well known songs. So there we were, Mr Murdoch, our engineer, Niall Young (yes Graham liked that) and Alan Braidwood – the AC’s in-house expert photographer watching Graham and his sideman, ace guitarist – Shane Fontayne quietly perform two beautiful versions of very well know songs from his back catalogue.

Our guests on the AC are 99% a total pleasure to host. We have the occasional bout of nerves, haughty stardom, diffidence or outright hostility but it’s so rare it really is unworthy of mention. Graham Nash’s ease, humility and musical generosity deserve a category all of their own. It was really when I watched him cross the room to pick up a chair for himself that my mind spun back 40 odd years.

I was 17 years old and travelling from Dundee to the Glasgow Apollo to see Neil Young for the first time. I’d had the tickets for weeks and yes, I was excited. What I’d forgotten until that moment I looked up to see Graham Nash crossing the floor with the quotidian chair was this….I’d spend days and nights before that day in 1976 imagining what I’d do if I ran into one of Crosby or Nash outside the Apollo. Clearly, I imagined, should the suggestion come from them I would drop everything I was about to do and run away with them to join the great rock ‘n’ roll circus. That’s how big a star Mr Nash was to me.

Shane Fontayne, your host and Graham Nash

So when he placed that chair down, the songs were recorded and we spent a little while in conversation you’ll forgive me if I occasionally had to pinch myself a little. We’d met before, though he couldn’t recall it, but getting Graham to sing for you…for your own radio show…what would my 17 year old Dundonian self have said?

You can hear that conversation this Tuesday as well as a catch up chat with our good friend Yola Carter who recorded a beautiful live session for us.

As well as this we’ll have new music from Odetta Hartman, Rayland Baxter, Phosphorescent and Dawn Landes. As ever we’re on air from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland. Join me if you can.

1. It was last week when I found myself south of London on a Brighton bound train and reflecting that there’s something slightly different about summer time trains. I remembered an early commuter line ride as a young teenager on my first visit alone in the capital when, with a friend, I took a train from Victoria to Sevenoaks and I encountered people and stories I’d only heard about on TV. Husbands waving farewell to the patient spouses returning to the family estate-car as the train gently bumped and  recommenced its way through the leafy summer settlements.

Why did it seem silence always came down so suddenly whenever the train stopped on those deserted platforms? It’s been a theme of many classic poems ..Edward Thomas’s Addlestrop being the best known.

It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform.

Later Dannie Abse wrote of a brief encounter on an unknown platform that was Not Addlestrop:

Not Adlestrop, no – besides the name
hardly matters. Nor did I languish in June heat.
Simply, I stood, too early, on the empty platform,
and the wrong train came in slowly, surprised, stopped.
Directly facing me, from a window,
a very, very pretty girl leaned out.

It was these summer stops on days heavy with heat and perhaps expectation, that brought my favourite train poem to mind. Phillip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings paints a beautiful picture of a slow holiday train to London as it picks up brides and grooms wending their way to start married life on honeymoons elsewhere catching the east coast train to Kings’s Cross. There’s always something deeply poignant about Larkin’s pointed loneliness set against the frivolous, careless happiness of the newly betrothed. I love the way the train journey sets out as any ride would until the author lifts his head out of the book to become aware of the fuss:

I was telling a friend this week about one of the smallest, but for me, most significant items on display at the Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville. Not much larger than a post-it note I was drawn for a good while to stare at a set list from can early 60’s gig somewhere in Oklahoma or Texas or Ohio…miles from home. The interesting point wasn’t the choice of songs or the running order but the little key notes in brackets at the side of each title. What it revealed was how country gigs happened back in the day. The artist would arrive in town and give a running order to the house-band describing in which keys each song should be performed and, well…. they’d take it from there.

It was a this point I turned to Patsy’s daughter, Julie Fudge, what was showing us around the museum and expressed surprise that the system was as hap-hazzard as it seemed from the note. ‘It’s country music,’ she replied, ‘it’s pretty simple stuff.’ How right she is I thought. Simple yet never, ever simplistic. Perhaps that’s the key to the whole thing.

If that was the one moment I remember more clearly than any other it’s only because of the window it opened into how the world once was. It’s the little details of social history which often reveal the larger truths. That’s why I loved walking the floor that day with Julie around her mother’s museum. We were looking at how we all came to know and love one of the most enduring country artists of all time. A ground breaking woman who changed the way people heard country music and popular song and did it at a time when many women were still expected to spend most of their time attending to domestic issues of family and home. The interesting side of Patsy’s story is how she managed to pull off both of these tasks and still have world-wide success as a recording artist. It was the conflict of career and domesticity which proved to be the breaking point of her first marriage to Gerald Edward Cline leading to divorce in 1957.It really still needs to be stated how few women are still priority country acts (look at the charts) and how 60 odd years ago a young girl from Winchester Virginia took on and changed the entire perception of the genre.

My walk around the Patsy Cline Museum back in March was much more than a nostalgia trip. It was a living testament to a woman whose influence has spread far beyond her short lived recording career. A career, it’s estimated, that lasted only five and a half years.

Join me this Tuesday evening  as Patsy’s daughter takes me round her mother’s beautifully curated exhibition and we talk about and listen to the songs which made the Nashville Sound.

That’s not all too. We’ll celebrate some of the people who have been influenced by Patsy and we’ll hear some great new music from Erin Rae, The Milk Carton Kids, Shannon Shaw and Jesse Dayton. There will be some charming reminders of the past from Vince Gill and Phosphorescent and some Lindsay Ell singing and playing John Mayer. Sound good? Join me from five past nine this Tuesday and repeated from seven on Friday on BBC Radio Scotland.

Perhaps you heard a few snippets of this week’s Mary Gauthier conversation on my Sunday Morning programme. If not you will be able to hear all of that and more on this week’s Another Country.

I found myself thinking a lot about Mary over the last week or so. It feels like Mary’s travelled with us since the very start. A visitor in our first year on air during Celtic Connections, I knew very early on  I wanted to hang out with that Mary Gauthier. Then (2009) she told me stories of how she’d cooked in a restaurant before turning her attention to making sense of the songs in her head. She switched careers from cooking to singing in her thirties and embarked on a career telling amazing true stories in her songs.

Here we are when we first met….

And our latest encounter….

Mary gave up drinking a long time ago but her most famous song, ‘I Drink’ is a perfect description of the honesty required in quitting addiction. The song is an anthem for Mary and has also been memorably covered by Bobby Bare and Tim McGraw. Mary cooked and worked simultaneously for a good few years before finally selling up her share in the Dixie Kitchen restaurant to finance making her second album ‘Drag Queens and Limousines.’

The Dixie Kitchen alluded to Mary’s real roots in Louisiana. Her first home was in New Orleans nevertheless it’s a place for which Mary feels little attachment. ‘It’s a party town’ Mary replied when I asked if she went back to perform, ‘People don’t want to listen.’ Listening is the key here. If you want to understand and love Mary’s music it will take time and a quiet space, but it will be more than worth it.

I learned this in 2011 when she released ‘The Foundling’. I remember walking round the park and listening intently on my iPod as the story unfolded of Mary’s search for her own birth mother. It’s a heartbreaking story with no real happy ending, but an album over which it is so worthwhile taking time. In the same category you can put the follow up: ‘Trouble and Love.’ Your heart will get broken in a million places but you’ll know you’ve been listening to the truth. It’s then you remember Rolling Stone voted Mary’s ‘Mercy Now’ one of the 40 saddest country songs of all time, and let’s be honest, there’s some tough competition in that category.

Mary came back in a couple of weeks ago when she was in Glasgow to play at St Luke’s on her current tour. She talked of her the times she’s been spending writing songs with soldiers and how well the record has been received by the press, the soldiers themselves and by the public. Again there’s some heartbreak…it wouldn’t be Mary without that…but there’s also a sense of Mary successfully articulating each story she heard on the writing camps and doing what great folk singers always do, passing it on.

On this week’s Another Country you can hear Mary in conversation and in session as she re-imagines some of the songs from ‘Rifles and Rosary Beads’, her current album of songs co-written with wounded veterans. We’ll celebrate Mary’s wider back catalogue and play some great people covering her songs. It’s going to be another fine night and it all kicks off at five past nine this Tuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.

It’s over ten years since I first set foot in Music City. One of my early memories of that first visit is my final songwriting session of the trip. I was to go to the house of Nanci Griffith and write ‘something’ with her. She’d already thrown me by declaring in an email, ‘I can’t write anything as I’m too angry about George Bush.’ I can’t remember how I countered that one but it probably ran along the lines of, ‘We’re not over the moon here about your president either.’

I remember an old guitar that I got to play and a story which I half remember about it being Billy Joe Shaver‘s and how he’d sold it at a knock down price while a little down on his luck. From memory the story involved Harlan Howard too and Nanci and I later talked about how none of these names really made any sense to me at the time.

I thought of Billy Joe this morning as I read about the Country Music Hall of Fame in downtown Nashville launching their new exhibit, ‘Outlaws and Armadillos.’ It’s a tribute to the Outlaw movement and celebrates the Austin Armadillo World HQ which hosted some of the Outlaw movements first gigs. (2$ cover charge to see Willie Nelson back in the day)

Over the weekend the HOF also hosted an opening concert produced by Dave Cobb and featuring the musical direction of Shooter Jennings. The band included Amanda Shires, Jason Isbell and Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett. Guests included Outlaw Queen Jessi Colter, Bobby Bare and the great Billy Joe Shaver himself. It sounded like quite a night.

We’ll hear a little bit more about the exhibition from our man on the ground, Bill DeMain on this Tuesday’s show as he had an exclusive sneak preview. It’s going to be running till 2021 so it’s a must see for all you folks who ask me for Nashville tips when heading out there.

Elsewhere on the show I’ll bring you some more from one of my favourite albums of recent months Hiss Golden Messenger’s Hallelujah Anyhow. I’ve noticed M.C. Taylor (the man who’s band HGM really is) has recently been working with Matthew E White at Spacebomb records too….so much to tell you. Look out too for new things from Neko Case, Maren Morris, The Milk Carton Kids and the aforementioned Amanda Shires.

We’ll have some our usual mix of lovely old records including some cuts from Jerry Reed and Dawn Landes and whatever occurs to us between now and then. Join me if you can on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine live from 9 this Tuesday repeated this coming Friday too.

In what must be the strangest interaction of my short life in my short history on Twitter I found myself having a barney with the wife of Miami Steve Van Zandt/Little Steven/Silvio-in-the-Soporanos. Someone had asked a question and I, oh callow naive fool that I am, answered it honestly. This is, of course, always a fatal error. It’s not going to happen again.

I’m going to do what politicians do when asked a direct question; I’ll answer a different one. In fact, I’ll write my own questions if that’s ok with you? A friendly cove asked me what I thought about Miami Steve/Little Steven/Silvio-in-the-Soporanos school programme. It had something to do with schools following some sort of curriculum which was based on rock ‘n’ roll or something. No doubt, entirely laudable. So what happened? Having no intention of having any involvement in anyone’s school programme (mate, I did my time) I was asked if I’d support a programme which included a ’40 chapter history of rock ‘n’ roll.’ I demurred sighting my firm religious belief that rock ‘n’ roll is something you want to get OUT of school for. I still believe that.

Mrs. Van Zandt/Little Steven/Silvio-in-the-Soporanos was less than impressed it seems. My duty, I understand, was to assist this programme. Well, good luck to it. Hope the kids enjoy it and it keeps them loving school. But here’s my question: when you walk out of the gates at night; what are you left dreaming about? Isn’t rock something we made despite teachers? Didn’t we find corners of days and nights to escape all of that? I did.

So it was interesting to meet those lovely Massachusetts former college-boys, Darlingside, who all met while studying together. It wasn’t at the prestigious Berkeley School of Music, however but at another Massachusetts school. Did they study music? No, it seems they used the music as the great escape from whatever it was they were meant to be doing.

You can hear why this was such a good idea on Tuesday when we’ll broadcast the results of that amazing session and conversation with the band.hear what they did to a Neil Young song just so they could perform it at a pal’s wedding. Hear how great their voices sound around one microphone and see (on video) how they still manage to play an assortment of instruments while they’re doing this.

We’ll celebrate lots of harmony groups from CSN and the aforementioned Y, to Fleet Foxes, I’m With Her and our dear Jellyman’s Daughter. Will there be any Miami Steve Van Zandt/Little Steven/Silvio-in-the-Soporanos? No there bloody won’t!

I often think of my wife’s Uncle Joe. He’d spent a bit of time in Scotland and different parts of the UK over the years but essentially he stayed home and kept the small piece of land in Gweedore Co. Donegal where he’d been born. There were a couple of cows and a good load of turf which would be dug out and fetched on a tractor and trailer to be dried and set out at the back of the house. A turf stack is in itself, a fabulous, practical installation.

He’d come over to Scotland occasionally and one time he visited us I offered him a whisky. Carrying two glasses in my hands in recognition that I would sit down with him and enjoy a drink together I clearly sent out an ambiguous message. He took them both and accepted with alacrity. I could almost imagine him saying to himself, ‘It must be a tradition here that you get 2 drinks.’

Joe’s own natural tongue was Gaelic so there was always the thought that everything was being translated. He’d have loved contemporary Scotland with the dual English/Gaelic signs but in those days he screwed over interesting words and rehearsed them aloud. I remember driving him to the station and him repeating over and over again the words, ‘Queen. Street. Station.’ It seemed to become a mantra. New names were an interesting verbal conundrum. My sister in law’s name, Lynsey, became a short musical canon for about five minutes. Never loud, almost mumbled but always audible.

Names, titles and categories fascinate me too. How used we are to certain ones and yet our tongues can spend an eternity twisting over a new discovery. I’m currently enjoying the word Ameripolitan. Until this morning I even thought I knew what it meant. I could imagine taking Countrypolitan as produced by Owen Bradley and moving it in to the next century. Oh yes, that would work.

I came across the word when doing a little reading about this week’s session guest, Whitney Rose. Encouraged and produced by Raul Malo (of Mavericks fame) Whitney has that Ameripolitan tag all over her. I kinda liked it. It seemed to suit the roots sophistication of what she’s doing. You can hear all of that in this Tuesday’s special session she recorded for us.

This morning I decided to dig a little deeper. I discovered that I was wholly wrong about my understanding of the word. It was coined by Texan Dale Watson to describe how he heard his own music which was struggling for it’s own categorisation.

I’m now feeling slightly cheated. I liked the idea of something that flowed on from Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells…hell, I like my own version of Ameripoltan! Step forward Rickapolitan…you heard it here first.

Join me this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland anyway. You’ll hear lots of music you love on vinyl, the fine Whitney Rose in session and we’ll again remind you that on our show, we just love country music. We’re live from five past nine.

It’s a funny old thing getting old. On one hand there’s much of modern life which eludes me and on the other there’s so much of the past I can enjoy for reasons of nostalgia which must seem incomprehensible to any millennial.

Much of this came to me while watching the football the other night in my old home town of Dundee. There’s so much that is familiar in walking down to Tannadice from Clepington Rd with my son. In some ways almost nothing has changed and yet…My pal and I got talking in the ground about how much of the stadium had changed, what half time refreshments consisted of (was it simply pies and bovril as he remembered?) and I recalled how during the early 70’s the crowds were so low the club put on side-shows at half-time to bring in more customers. Who can forget the pie eating contest or Santa visiting one year? (Santa, it seems, still runs our defence)

There is in music too a great nostalgia for the past, often half remembered. There’s much that I forget but I’m quite good on years. Unfailingly someone will insist on telling me they saw a gig I was involved in before it was even possible to have performed it. Musicians will wax endlessly about instruments built in particular years and insist (usually to long suffering partners) how owning a particular guitar of some far off year will make  their musical journey so complete that all appropriate sacrifices should be made.

There is too a  great myth of old for old’s sake. The word ‘tape’ is now expelled so reverently in some circles one almost feels the need to genuflect. The disdain with which certain musician vew the term MP3 is always a joy to behold. A very good producer told me how a more famous producer colleague insisted he had such items on his computer until the first one helpfully went through his digital store to point out that, contrary to his claims, he listened to them all the time. Neil Young is the high priest of this incorruptible sonic school. Quite how Neil establishes the difference in the aural quality of digital sampling after a lifetime of rockin’ in the free world at deafening volume is beyond me.

I thought of some of this when thinking about our guests this week, The Low Anthem. When they first appeared as session guests they brought with them a rolling musical junk shop of instruments and tuned percussion that delighted us. Eschewing the musical snobbery of all I have set down above they rejoiced in the pump organ, the crotale and the slightly distressed drum kit. They created the impression that, should someone offer to replace any of these artefacts with more reliable pristine items, they’d be told where they could put store them.

So it was sad to hear of the missing years of the band where many of the instruments used in these early gigs and recordings were destroyed in the van crash which also injured bassist and founder member Jeff Prytowsky. In a remarkable turn of events it was the convalescence of his band mate Prytowski that triggered the creative spurt of Ben Knox Miller to write the current album, ‘The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth of The Sea.’ You can hear that story and the band in session on this Tuesday’s Another Country when they’ll share the genesis of this album and what really went on in the years since we last saw them.

We’ll have bluegrass, gospel, country music you love and some great new things from Kim Richey, Kala Kater, Deam Owens and many more. We’ll be live this Tuesday from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can.