It’s a strange thing only to know things second-hand. Back in my day we used to get albums on the Pickwick label (if I remember correctly) which re recorded popular hits of the day with session singers and players. The results must have given some satisfaction as they sold by the bucket load but in reality they were dire affairs. Ersatz copies of killer pop music does not pop music make.

So too, we often heard country music where we managed to bypass the originators. I’ve come to love Bobby Bare over the last then years or so but I can openly admit I’d really no idea who he was until I started taking my current weekly interest in country music. Oh, I knew the songs…500 Miles, Detroit City, Four Strong Winds and, of course, The Streets of Baltimore – some of the best country recordings of all time. I’d heard them via other sources – often very good, Gram Parsons being the best example – but it’s really great to know why  Gram and Neil Young (who also famously cut Four Strong Winds) loved some of these songs so much in the first place.

On this week’s AC we welcome our Nashville correspondent who’s had time to think about Bobby Bare as he celebrates sixty years since his first major single, The All America Boy. In fact, as I understand it, Bill met the man himself and he will no doubt tell us more on Tuesday evening.

Elsewhere I’ll bring you the first new release from Jason Aldean since the dreadful events in Las Vegas last year when he was onstage during the shootings at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. We’ll also be thinking the artist who, I think, inspired the sound of First Aid Kit. Alela Diane’s new album is out now and it’s really beautiful but we also think her earlier recordings may have influenced the sound of the Soderberg sisters from Sweden just a little.

Finally we’ll bring you some exciting new artists. Listen out from some cool new country rock from Belle Adair, Jesse Terry and Darling West. Be prepared for the long awaited return of Josh T Pearson and ready yourself to be shocked at one of the biggest pop stars in the world making an appearance on our play list. Yes…it’s Another Country from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

Also…..

I’m back on Sunday Mornings from next Sunday and I’ll be in conversation with retired priest Willy Slavin about his incredible life where he’s worked in Bangladesh as well as serving time as a prison chaplain and has now retired to a hut in Fife which contains only a bed and an iPad . I’ll also be speaking to my fellow Sunday morning presenter, Richard Holloway about his new book, “Waiting For The Last Bus’ where he asks the big questions we all have about what happens after we complete our three score years and ten. There will also, of course, be music. We’re on Sunday morning from five past ten on BBC Radio Scotland. Join me for both shows if you can.

I’m indebted to a listener…Jeremy, if I remember correctly…who reminded me about a new John Prine single about to emerge from a new John Prine album. I re-listened as I’d already taken notice, and I thought he was right. We need to play this.

There should really not be any question about playing anything by John Prine but for the fact I can’t really reconcile myself to where he fits in on my (considerably long) timeline. Firstly I go back to the mid to late seventies and I’m sitting in old pal Rod Gordon’s house off the Kingsway in Dundee where we would just stay up late and play records..loud. He would spin me through the back pages of all the things I’d missed. There would be an inevitable 40 mins or so of prog where I’d have to kid on I was enjoying something vile by King Crimson or some such, but then the mood would change, and suddenly Rod would have whipped off the vinyl and replaced it with Country Boy by Head, Hands and Feet featuring the brilliant Albert Lee.

It was one of these moments when Rod said to me, ‘You’ve heard Sam Stone, haven’t you?’ In fairness this was such a big moment that Rod would would spare me the record and cut straight to the chase. Out came the guitar and Rod would sing and play the song perfectly. This was my introduction to John Prine.

Some time later while cruising record shops I came across a compilation of artists from The Bottom Line in NYC on which was John Prine’s original version of Sam Stone. It’s a brilliant song about a Vietnam Vet who comes home with a drug habit brought on by the medication from his war wound. “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.‘ It brought together so much of my life I can’t describe how high I rated and still love the song. And yet….

And yet it still seemed of it’s time and perhaps, because of that time – post Vietnam, pre punk, protest folk singing, it surprised me to see John Prine still so respected and loved by the Americana generation. Tonight on Another Country we’ll try to explain some of that loyalty and love as we play Prine songs from early seventies to present day.

Listen out too for new names: HC MCEntire, Levi Hummon, Stables and Lowpine. Some old friends too…Alison Krauss, Dan Auerbach, Hank Locklin and Caitlin Rose.

It’s the kind of night I really love on the old AC. I do enjoy a guest but I also love being able to do what my pal Rod did all these years ago…bring in a pile of records and play them all because…..well because we love country music.

We’ll be on air from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

There is something very powerful about the first time you discover your own music being played and enjoyed in a different culture. I remember hearing the Blue Nile coming through the airwaves on Medium Wave one night in the mid 80’s and thinking…I wish that was my band I was hearing.

Over the weekend I had the joy of reconnecting with an audience in Spain for the first time in 25 years. Trying to communicate bluntly in my set-piece Spanish raps was tolerated but it was so much easier just to let the music take over. What a beautifully simple international language music is. I remember encountering a cellist in Los Angeles who spoke very limited English and it turned out he’d fled Beijing after the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He’d landed in LA unable to speak English but was able to work because he read and interpreted his music in common with his new colleagues in the Philharmonic Orchestra of the city.

This Tuesday it really will be Another Country. We shall welcome to Studio One (the home of all great AC events) The Orphan Brigade who will bring from Tennessee the music they imagined, wrote and recorded in Osimo, Italy. The Orphan Brigade are producer Nielson Hubbard, mandolinist Joshua Britt and singer songwriter, Ben Glover who’ll give the evening further international prestige by hailing from Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland. Are you still with me?

The music the Orphan Brigade have made was all written below the streets of Osimo in the heart of a cave under the city….and it was this that gave their new album its title. It’s a worthy successor project to their last record which was recorded in an antebellum haunted mansion in Franklin, Kentucky. Their our trio picked up on the stories surrounding the house and its own history of being host to both sides during the civil wars. Visiting the house with them last year on a warm May evening it wasn’t hard to let Octagon Hall work its magic and soon we were sitting on the porch watching the fireflies, drinking beer and making music together. It was a wonderful evening.

(Nielson, your host, Gregor Philp, Ben and Josh on a spooky night in Octagon Hall in Kentucky, May ’17)

We’ll hear the stories, the songs and experience the spontaneous joy of music made across boundaries and time lines on this week’s AC.

Listen out too for new music from musicians produced by the OB’s Nielson Hubbard from (next week’s special guest) Caroline Spence and Dean Owens. We’ll hear news from last week’s UK Americana Awards featuring winners Robert Plant, Courtney Marie Andrews, Sam Outlaw and the man who was getting rave notices after his appearance at the festival, Tyler Childers.

It’s all going to happen in two hours and we start at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

Every year I attempt to explain the magic of the song round and every year I meet people who come along to experience it who can testify how enjoyable it is to hear songwriters tell the stories and share their songs.

This year as part of our Celtic Connections show we’re going to change the format (slightly) and have all our artists playing in the studio together without a live audience. We’ve never done it this way before but we’re hoping they will enjoy the freedom to digress with a few anecdotes and back-stories to their songs.

It’s often the diversions and sidetracks which make for the most fun on these nights and over the last ten years or so I’ve been lucky to see rounds in different venues and towns and have witnessed at first hand the joy of hearing songs in the most intimate circumstances. The story was that the Carter Cash family would invite various writers and performers to they house for ‘guitar pulls’ where on a good night you might hear the family names themselves and off-shoots of the same as well as Kris Kristofferson, Graham Nash, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. 

In the round’s most famous venue, The Bluebird, you may well have no names you recognise but you will invariably know some of the songs. The Nashville song writers are nothing if not diverse and well connected and the songs you may listen to on any night of the week will have been hits in places far away from Tennessee. I remember being at a song-circle in London where I heard Desmond Childs – a great Nashville luminary – play a fairly rudimentary version of one of his biggest hits on a keyboard which had seen better days. Bon Jovi’s, ‘Livin On a Prayer’ never sounded so raw!

One night in Belfast a good few years ago I sat in wonder as Don Shlitz poured out song after song….surely he couldn’t possibly have written them all….even The Gambler? But, of course, he had.

This Tuesday we’ve invited a diverse cross-over of roots artists to play their songs in the round. We’ll enjoy the folk flavourings and brilliant string arrangements of Laura Cortese & The Dance Cards who’ll play songs from their current, excellent album California Calling. Along with East Nashville troubadour Aaron Lee Tasjan both these acts will be first time guests to the old AC. Finally they will be joined by two old friends who we are delighted to be welcoming back. The Secret Sisters from Alabama will be returning eight years after they first recorded a session in our legendary Studio One in Pacific Quay.

There will only be these three acts on the show for two hours of intimate performance and shared stories. We like to think it will be a very special night you won’t want to miss. Join us live if you can from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

I’m not given to reading many rock ‘n’ roll biographies. Often I realise I’ve loved people’s music for a lifetime knowing almost nothing about their own private stories. When I have decided to learn more (I admit I’ve made notable exceptions for Bruce and Bob) I realise I’ve often found the whole thing less than interesting. What does draw me in though are the real tales of what happened in the studio. There’s something about that sacred space – where strangers are seldom invited – that arouses my curiosity.

I suppose all of us would love to have been in Memphis the day Elvis met Sam Phillips to record that waxing for his Mom. (Or then again in Abbey Road on that first Beatle audition with George Martin or standing beside Kris Kristofferson in Nashville as he watched  Dylan and Bob Johnston piece together Blonde on Blonde. Then there is that day when Johnny Cash came to visit on Nashville Skyline and on that record too the famous question asked by Dylan of Mr Johnston, (his producer) ‘Is it rolling Bob?’

I’d like to know where the microphones were placed and how they were listening and how they heard the roughs if they took them away. I’d like to know how long they took and how they tuned up. Dam it, I’d love to have seen and heard all of it.

I thought of all of this while listening to this week’s special guests, ‘The Strange Blue Dreams.’ They have made an album that sounds in parts like it could have been recorded any time over the last 60 years. There are beautiful warm analogue sounds, gorgeous freedom of styling and a depth and space to the music that belies their youth. How it was all done is one of my first questions for them when they assemble in our legendary Studio One to perform our first AC session of the year.

Later on we’re going to touch base with some familiar names including Allison Moorer & Shelby Lynne, Teddy Thompson & Kelly Jones and hear new music from First Aid Kit, The Deslondes and Ireland’s own The Lost Brothers. I’ll also introduce you to the music of this young woman.

I suspect the name Sunny War will become a little familiar to you over the next year or so. We’re going to play you a song that will explain all of that.

There is so much we need to get in and there’s only two hours. We kick off at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

Over Christmas and New Year, when we were all enjoying being inside on any given day, the Ross family endured that festive old chestnut, the central heating breakdown. I suppose if it’s going to happen it’s never going to be July, but when it’s been out for three weeks and (thankfully) power has been restored, you’ll forgive me for a little meteorological diversion.

One of the things you do when you have no heating is to check out how it’s all playing out for everyone else. The iPhone weather app (unreliable as it may be) is good for a quick glance at how the rest of the world is faring. I couldn’t help but notice that Music City, Tennessee was enduring a fairly cold winter. I’ve never been in Nashville between November and February so I’ve no way of knowing how cold it gets but people have told me a few stories. Over Christmas temperatures were regularly around -6 and I’d imagine there were one or two folk over there taking badly with, what is most of the year, a fairly benign climate.

The legendary Hank Williams car ride from Alabama to West Virginia over New Year 1953 took him from the relatively warmth of the southern state through to Chattanooga Tn. where the snow made Hank change his plans and try to get a flight to his destination. Alas, that flight got cancelled and 29 year old Hank Williams died in the rear seat of his Cadillac. It’s a dark and lonely story from the depths of the winter which always makes me think the south must look and feel a whole lot different in the months around the turn of the year.

This Tuesday we’ll welcome back a man who knows. Our Nashville correspondent Bill DeMain will be joining us to tell us how the holidays and the winter has been for him. I happen to know it’s not stopped Bill getting out and about and picking up all the best stories from our Country Capital. Here’s how the Mother Church of Country Music, The Ryman Auditorium looks when the snow is falling over Nashville.

We’ll also get a chance to play you some new names from 2018. Listen out for records by Ruby Boots, Tyler Childs and Ferris & Sylvester as well as the return of old friends Anderson East, Margo Price and Rodney Crowell. We’ll have some gorgeous harmonies, some fine pickers and some Americana blues and soul in our two hours on air.

By Tuesday evening there’s a very good chance that you will be listening somewhere with snow on the ground as it’s going to get cold in Scotland over the next 24 hours. So listen in to hear about how they do things in Twang Town when the weather gets cold and if it really is as wintry as they say it’s going to get, our selection of artists and songs will guaranteed to light a little fire in your heart.

It all starts at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening. Join me if you can.

If you’ve seen the movie ‘Walk The Line’ (which seemed to be on again sometime over the festive season) you’ll know well something of the atmosphere at Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison show. There is an almighty noise throbbing through  the refectory walls as Cash and his band wait to come on stage and an ominous sense of fear while they listen to the sound of the inmates stamping their feet on the floor. It’s perhaps that tension, so beautifully caught in James Mangold’s film, which is the necessary fuel for the performance.

Live at Folsom was a high risk strategy at the time. Johnny Cash’s own personal story may have had a few flashpoints during the sixties but the general trajectory of his career was heading downwards. It had been a while since he’d had a hit record and, although adored by the country community and those in the wider music world who really understood, he was already becoming a name from the past. Looking at what had happened in 60’s – when pop music was really properly invented – it’s not difficult to see the speed of change. Stand still for a moment and the music business would quickly leave you behind.

Into all of that Johnny Cash threw a line back to the start of his career. Based on the love of one song, Folsom Prison Blues, Cash had built a dedicated audience behind the bars of America’s penitentiaries. Folsom Prison Blues had been a single from his first album in 1955 and the song became a trademark opener in all his live appearances. As early as 1958 Cash’s popularity within the penal system took him to play at San Quentin, one of California’s biggest jails. On New Year’s Day 1958 (60 years ago this month) a ‘captive’ audience that day included Merle Haggard, serving time for robbery and starting to plot his own career in country music.

Ten years later Johnny Cash, with the original musicians from his Sun Records session of 1955, would perform two concerts at Folsom Prison in California which would be recorded by Columbia Records by the legendary Bob Johnstone (Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Simon and Garfunkel) for a live album release. The gamble paid of. ‘At Folsom Prison’ launched the second-half of Johnny Cash’s career. Indeed, were it not for that album it’s unlikely we’d still be celebrating him as one of the country greats he undoubtedly is. Critically lauded, it went on to be a massive selling record around the world and as recently as 2003 was made no 88 in Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time.

This Tuesday we’ll play cuts from the album and talk about that special relationship between Johnny Cash and the men who listened to his music who could only dream of travelling. As old as country music itself the relationship between the prisoner and the song is long and intertwined. Most of the men listening to Johnny and The Tennessee Three that day in Folsom would know this lyric by Hank Williams, and dream of places they’d never see:

All alone I bear the shame
I’m a number not a name
I heard that lonesome whistle blow
All I do is sit and cry
When the ev’nin’ train goes by
I heard that lonesome whistle blow

On the second song on the album, the great Merle Travis’s ‘Dark As A Dugeon,’ a nervous sounding Johnny breaks out of his performance to explain to the Folsom inmates that they are recording the gig for a future release. There is a mutual understanding in that song, shared by the performer and the audience on the day, that for many, there is no escape or even possibility of redemption. In the jail, life was indeed as dark as a dungeon. Join us as we hear how Johnny Cash opened a window into that reality and, in his own solidarity with those inside the bars allowed us to imagine and them to dream of a better day ahead.

We’re live on BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening from five past nine.

There is, it appears, no shortage of music. There’s never been a time when I knew so much about pop music and, in reality, know almost nothing at all. Whole lists of albums come out about which I really know nothing. I click on a link and a new world appears with related genres of bands and singers who seem to be popular across the world but who have never registered with me. It’s called getting old, but it’s also something to do with the diversity we enjoy in popular culture. I’m ok with all of that and am happy to find new things all the time.

However there is another side to all of this which none of us needs: the ubiquity of tuned sound. Music has reached too many places and in the wrong way. I spent an interesting time in Beijing last week where Mrs Ross and I visited our youngest daughter who’s studying there. At one point I decided to leave my hotel room to let my daughter enjoy some western luxury – her Hutong accommodation is compact and characterful but a little less than lavish – and I took myself and my book down to the bar. I could have plonked down in the lobby, but I was aware there was a mix tape of Christmas music which would certainly  have taken my mind away from the novel. So, to the bar. Half-lit with added Christmas neon seeping in from the front of the building, I could tell I wasn’t  their ideal client. He would have been able to read as he’d be on his back-lit iPhone X and, frankly, none of the hip-hop remixes to Bing Crosby festive classics would have offended him as he’d probably be too busy watching something streaming out of his mobile. His phone too would have fitted in well to the ambience of bar noises as tills bleeped, burped and rang out merrily. As far as  reading went this was a lost cause. The lift seemed a good option. I could just go up and down the 20 odd floors for 40 mins except I’d have to listen to Michael Bolton get higher and higher with any ‘relief’ only coming from a be-santa’d Mariah Carey. When I say there’s so much music I don’t know, believe me when I tell you there are some things which never leave your head.

It’s not all music of course. Much of it has music within it but there the similarity ends. On my flight home I had rows of young people who seemed able to have their phones making any amount of electronic emissions at 40,000 feet. The pilot had a ring call, the steward had an electronic pre-roll and when ever a short period of turbulence occurred we were alerted by a new burst of notes. I don’t know about you, but when an Airbus starts shoogling around at 700 miles an hour I’m pretty quick to put on my seat-belt without the aid of a theme song.

Silence, here in my own kitchen, on this quiet Tuesday morning, is golden. Tonight on BBC Radio Scotland I’ll attempt to bring you meaningful music with words to match. Songs that can sneak into your life and stay with you for all the right reasons. The best songs. The ones we’ve been playing all year and some great Christmas tracks Mariah and Bolton free.

Music is beautiful and words and music together which make up the songs we love is the greatest thing in the world for me. So listen out for Whitney Rose, Nikki Lane, Sam Outlaw and Marty Stuart. Throw another log on the fire for Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. It’s two hours I’m looking forward to sharing with you. Once we get through that ghastly new radio Scotland jingle we should be safe from extraneous noise.

Join me this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine.

On this week’s Another Country we celebrate our favourite songs of the year. We don’t do lists remember. There is no ‘countdown,’ no pecking order and no winners and losers. However we do feel it’s a worthy exercise to recap the songs we loved most. Richard Murdoch and I have sent each other a few choice suggestions and found our selves in total agreement about those we have loved.

So this Tuesday night you’ll hear Part One of our songs, albums and artists of the year. Thanks too to all of you who have been kind enough to post up your suggestions on Facebook. There have been lots of great nominations and many of the things you have posted have already been selected – which is good to know.

Songs get in your head do they not? Over the last month I’ve been out on tour and have come onstage and offstage to different records being played by my big pal Steph who mixes my sound for the audience and for me. On more than one occasion it’s been Bruce Johnston’s brilliant ‘Disney Girls’ as performed by the Beach Boys. It’s so perfect in so many ways it stopped me on my tracks on the way to the dressing room. One night, towards the end of the tour I found myself (correctly) thinking, ‘Is there anything in my arsenal as good as that? Probably not…but it’s good to have something to shoot for.’

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t get beaten down by great songs…I only get inspired. That, I believe is what they are made to do.

At the end of the year I often think back to the stupid things people pontificate about modern music….oh nothing’s as good as the 50s/60s/70/s etc…. Please! There really is so much to celebrate. New artists are coming through all the time and many of the great artists we love just keep coming up with more new things all the time.

So this Tuesday tune in to hear some fine selections from the greats…Willie Nelson, Ray Davies, Lee Ann Womack and David Rawlings. The under celebrated, Charlie Dore, Laura Cortese and Iron and Wine and the new names to have thrilled us in the last 12 months Holly MacVe, The Strange Blue Dreams and Angelina. There are many more old friends too who keep delighting us year on year…but for those names you’ll just have to join us live from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM this coming Tuesday evening.

It was a lovely spring evening when Richard Murdoch, The AC’s esteemed producer, and I drove into Franklin Tennessee a few miles west of Nashville. We were making the trip out to the sticks to witness one of radio’s finer gatherings, ‘Music City Roots.’ It’s a live show which features lots of Americana artists and includes old school radio ads, interviews and all round entertainment.

It was here we first encountered Chicago’s, ‘The Way Down Wanderers’ playing live and selling their debut album. Naturally Mr M picked up their vinyl and we started playing their records as soon as we got back to Scotland. 18 months on we are delighted they’ve finally made it to the UK and this Tuesday we will broadcast their first ever radio session. TWDW are essentially a bluegrass band playing their own music and adding in a drum kit with an original repertoire of songs written by their two lead singers, Austin Thompson and Collin Krause.

Listen out for a very special session where they play selections from their eponymously titled debut album produced by a member of the band that inspired them, The Avett Brothers’ Mike Marsh. In the future you’ll hear much more about The Way Down Wanderers but mark well this Tuesday, the day you hear them first on your own radio.

If that’s not enough we are delighted to welcome back Anthony D’Amato. I’ve been enjoying Anthony’s music since we first heard it almost five years ago. Over the last month he’s been opening for me on my solo sojourn through the British Isles. I’m delighted to say he’s every bit as good live as he is on record and he’s made some fine recordings. His last album, appropriately titled, ‘Cold Snap,’ was produced by former Bright Eyes and First Aid Kit producer, Mike Mogis. (also a one time member of Monsters of Folk) However Anthony has since produced a mini benefit EP of songs round the themes of refuge and asylum where all the profits went to the International Rescue Committee.

Anthony will be playing a song from that EP by the late Tom Petty as well as selections from his own considerable back catalogue. He’s still a young man with so much music in front of him but we’re delighted he’s already coming back for the third time to Another Country.

In between all of that we’ll find time to celebrate Merle Travis, hear something brand new from Neil Young and Colter Wall and even hear this year’s first festive offering from Ben Glover and  Natalie Schlabs.

All this in two hours I almost hear you say….yes, but you need to join us at five past nine this Tuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.