When news broke about David Bowie’s death this week I realised it had left me feeling shocked but also fairly numb. I didn’t really know how to respond alone over my breakfast radio. Then within a short time the news played a montage of songs which broke my heart and then the tears came fairly quickly. What devastating facts could not induce, music succeeded in touching and gently nudging.

Like most, if not all of you, I didn’t know Bowie. Cold facts about loss can be just that until you hear the detail. The detail with any artist has to be the art itself. So, when the news played a montage of small clips from 40 odd years of Bowie songs I felt a deep loss of someone who had touched my life. The songs made all the difference.

One of the things I loved about him most was his enthusiasm for new music. I well remember hearing him being interviewed on radio by Marks Radcliffe and Reilly and being asked what he’d like to hear on the radio after the interview was over. He requested Granddaddy, who were just breaking through at that time. As a fan of that album I was so delighted to hear a star championing that still unheralded gem. In that spirit then we will bring you a playlist tonight that celebrates all that is good and bold in the new releases.

We’ll start with the exciting news of Margo Price. We’ve told you about Margo before and we think we have probably been the first to play her music  in the UK. However she’s just been recorded by Jack White and her first release is out on Third Man Records. You can hear that getting its first spin on the show this week.

In fairness some of these records came out towards the end of last year in North America but, to my knowledge, have received very few spins over on this side of the Atlantic. So I’ll play you a great track from Krista Detor who’s beautiful minimal album ‘Barely’ has been playing in my house and car all this week. I will reveal a gorgeous other piece of minimalism from Cam Penner, explain why you might want to check out The Mike and Ruthy Band at The Old Fruitmarket this week and a little piece of magic from this side of the water by Keston Cobblers Club. We’ll also mourn the passing of Red Simpson the great Bakersfield singer who made the Truck song his own particular speciality. We’ll remind you of some of the great country acts appearing at Celtic Connections over the next few weeks and I’m happy to bring you a Don Gibson song covered by two names never before played on the AC, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper.

One final thought: As I went deep into my thought last night at my first yoga session of the new year my mind wandered back to David Bowie. How sad it was I had never seen him in concert or even been in the same place at the same time. And then I remembered the story I used to tell but had temporarily forgotten. It was the early 90s and we were visiting LA and staying down La Cienega which, when it hit Sunset at the top of the hill, had a large parking lot hosting the best Tower Records you could ever imagine. It was always my duty to make a pilgrimage and this morning I’d decided to do the thing no LA resident would ever dream of; I walked. As I made my way from the hotel on a quiet side street a beautiful sight came into view. A racing Green E Type Jaguar convertible, top down gleaming in the morning sunshine. Behind the wheel, slowly taking the corner, the proud driver smiling in the joy of the day. It was David Bowie.

It’s good to know the story from the start. I checked back and my first blog about Rhiannon Giddens‘ band, Carolina Chocolate Drops came out in March 2010. They visited us then and again in 2012 and how life has changed.

The first time they dropped by Rhiannon was juggling the duties of travelling, singing and playing with looking after her baby daughter. Interviews were conducted between key feeding times and generally (I’d imagine) life on the road was a fairly tough job, all carried out on a fairly limited budget. The good news was that they were moving in the right direction. You may well have witnessed some of those early gigs – there was a great reaction when they played Celtic Connections – but you may not then have predicted where Rhiannon Giddens’ career would be in January 2016.

Although the band have continued to thrive, one particular night back in 2013 changed the trajectory of Rhiannon’s career. You can see the video for yourself where she steals the show on ‘Another Day, Another Time’ a concert to celebrate the music from the film, ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ and receives a very well deserved standing ovation from the New York audience. But, perhaps more importantly, standing in the wings was the curator of the night, T Bone Burnett who asked if he could produce a record with her. “It was clear the first time I heard her at rehearsal that Rhiannon is next in a long line of singers that include Marian Anderson, Odetta, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe,” he went on. “We need that person in our culture.”

We do and we have. Hear her talk with me about that collaboration and much more from her debut album, ‘Tomorrow Is My Turn,’ on Tuesday evening.

We have an exclusive for you this week.  We’ll play the first track from a new album of duets by Kelly Jones and our old friend, Teddy Thompson. We’ll also have the first single from the new Lucinda Williams album and we’ll be reminding you that as well as Lucinda there will be some very special guests at this year’s Celtic Connections. We will be welcoming three of them to our CCA Round on the 19th January; Rickie Lee Jones, Angaleena Presley and Noah Gundersen and playing some of their current music on the show.

We’ll remind you how good Don Williams, Faith Hill and Leon McAuliffe sound and still surprise with you a new thing or two. Did I mention that fine single from the upcoming Aoife O’Donovan album? Thought not. Join me if you can from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.

Despite the fact they’ve been well warned they are having me back on the airwaves this Sunday too. I hope to be talking to Tracey Ullman and playing you more great acts visiting Celtic connections this January. It all starts at five past ten.

Joan Shelley

It’s been a remarkable year. Tempted as it always is to write a list I have restrained myself for one more year. There are plenty of blokes out there who will provide you with a list or two if you need one……and I’m sure you already know where to look.

However it has been a great year for music. We’ve discovered some fine new artists and, particularly pleasing for me, we’ve seen some artists return with exceptional follow up albums.

So some mention should be made of excellent sequels from Samantha Crain, Punch Brothers, Laura Marling and Joan Shelley...you have all made us very happy. However we’ve been delighted by (what for us) have been some excellent debuts. Step forward Angeleena Presley, Brandy Clark, Andrew Combs, Daniel Romano, Sam Outlaw, Nadia Reid, 10 String Symphony and C Duncan. This has been a vintage year and I suspect 2016 is going to have to get off to a flyer to beat it.

Sam Outlaw

What is really interesting too is that country music has found its voice again. We’ve seen Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard get together and make an excellent album that, despite being ignored by country radio, went to No 1 on the country chart. It’s been great year too for Jason Isbell who has been embraced by the mainstream and the country audience. How satisfying too is it to see Kacey Musgraves consolidate the phenomenal success of her debut album with a second record that is even better (in my humble opinion.)

It’s within our rights to expect these interesting records from outwith the mainstream but I’ve been particularly taken by one of two Music Row offerings that have combined fabulous voices with great songs. Step forward Little Big Town, Eric Church, Carrie Underwood and Chris Young.

We’ve played some of these records last week and we’ll keep on the roll this Tuesday as we celebrate this unique, creative twelve months. As well as this we have found some Christmas gems from The Louvins, Gene Autrey, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris. Capping all of this off a seasonal duet from two of the best voices in country music: Alison Krauss and Alan Jackson.

We do all of this in two hours and, of course, it’s not too late to hear part one of our best-of-the-year from last week via the iplayer. Once more none of this would have been possible without my great friend and producer Mr Richard Murdoch ably assisted by Kirsten Harris. So, from all of us, we wish you a very Happy Christmas and we thank you for listening. Join us this Tuesday from five past nine if you can. We’re on BBC Radio Scotland.

Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. I’ve told it over a few nights on my recent tour but, considering we are so deeply into the season of Advent, I feel there is scope for one more retelling.

A couple of years ago my old car died. The kids christened him George…..’He looks like one,’ they said. It didn’t just get traded in or handed on – though I did try; it died. The engine gave up and it stopped being the car it was meant to be, a thoroughly reliable estate car. For the record it was a Mercedes E Class. It carried 6 of us with any one of the kids still being able to bring a pal and room for the dog in the boot too. Had it not predeceased us it would probably done a decent turn as a hearse itself as all the seats came down transforming it into a van carrying old beds, garden waste, junk for the city dump and, oh yes, every year, a Christmas Tree.

The car predated the birth of my, now 15 year old son, and for years it would just be his sisters in the back as we went down to the same garden centre every year to pick up a tree. When he was old enough he joined in the ritual too. We’d work out a formula where we could fold down just enough of the seats to squeeze in the biggest tree we’d dare to bring home.

‘Any size at all,’ I’d boast, ‘There’s no tree this old car won’t carry.’ Then we’d squeeze back in as disparate, stray branches determined their way under seat belts and stroked our ears on the 3 mile run home. The tree unpacked and the lights put on I’d return to the car the next day and always get a mild surprise as the family car, which for most of the twelve months stank of left-over food wrappers, horse riding detritus and and assorted uncaterogisable waste, suddenly smelt of a rich scots pine forrest and gave off the sure scent of Christmas.

So tonight, before we go on air, I hope to have completed that same journey with a teenager and a twenty one year old to recreate the old magic. We squeeze a slightly smaller tree into a smaller car that smells a bit better for most of the year and we ruefully reflect that the old bus would have taken it with much more ease. Here’s to you George, gone but not forgotten.

By the time we get home and the lights are on I’ll begin to feel that Christmas is truly happening. As the baubles go on we usually opt for Jim Reeves and Bruce Cockburn’s respective Christmas records.

So if you’re doing something similar this evening why don’t you simply turn on the radio and we’ll sort out the soundtrack. We’ll play you some beautiful country songs of the season and sprinkle in some of our favourite artists of the last year. Look out for songs by Jason Isbell, Angaleena Presley, Andrew Combs, Punch Brothers, Kitty Wells, Nick Lowe and Mindy Smith.

We start at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland. Join me if you can.

Blest be the tie that bind our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship our spirit finds is like to that above.

One of my Dad’s favourite hymns which he was wont to breaking into at any given point. It’s the third verse which may, however, have moved a young Bruce Springsteen:

We share our mutual woes; Our mutual burdens bear; And often for each other flows The sympathizing tear.

When I heard the song and saw the title I was taken; smitten even. Of course Springsteen’s Christian imagery had been there before. Promised Land, Blinded By The Light, Lost in The Flood…it’s all there. But on The River themes of loss and redemption dominate. Perhaps it was the stage he was at or perhaps the theme was always there or perhaps when you’ve driven the car so far it’s inevitable you will come across the Wreck On the Highway not far behind the place where you met the boys Racing In the Street.

In 1980 I was on a train station where I found a pink fluorescent button badge with the legend  ‘I Love Bruce Springsteen’ typed on. It seemed the perfect response to an artist who demanded we sit up and pay attention but wanted that to include having enormous fun.

On Tuesday’s AC we’ll listen to and admire the story of The Ties That Bind, Bruce Springsteen’s expanded Box-Set of outtakes from 1979/80 where the story of The River is laid bare. In a revealing HBO documentary he describes how, over a period of two years, he found the characters that inhabit Drive All Night, Point Blank, The River and other great songs on the record but also how, once he’d established the characters he wanted to play the kind of music they’d be listening to each night as they went out to bars and clubs. Perhaps this more than anything explains the abandoned joy of Ramrod, Sherry Darling and Out In The Street. Playing the music will explain more.

Incidentally…if you’re not sure what any of this has to do with country music then know that Bruce explains the music he was listening to at that time was provided by Dolly Parton, Roy Acuff, George Jones and Johnny Cash.

I suspect he was not immune to the charm of Willie Nelson either. In a celebration of another remarkable album we will listen with fresh ears to one of country’s great concept albums, Red Headed Stranger 40 years on.

It’s going to be a good night. Join me from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland if you can.

A few months ago someone asked me (on twitter) what my favourite live even had been so far this year. It made me think for a moment. Gosh ..I thought….I have been to plays, films, gigs all kinds of things but i couldn’t really say I’d loved any of them enough to remember, less to rave about.

In the context of the AC I have, in truth, seen a number of very fine gigs which have carried me away so much that i have gone on about it for weeks on end. These shows however have been from newer acts whose live show I may well have never seen before…..and I’ve usually been on the guest lis…and critically…its been on a week night when I can slip in and out at my conveniece and not annoy Mrs R by taking up a precious weekend night.

Then something strange happened. We were at a lovely event in George Square where we were to welcome and support the idea of new refugees coming to Scotland. There, in a quiet moment, my good pal Craig Smillie revealed to me his new role as the new man about town. In his role as one of THE people behind the fab Glad Cafe, Craig is now in the box seat to see every new and up and coming band on the west coast of Scotland. He reeled off name after name as I stood in jaw dropping amazement. I reminded him he was now of official retirement age and should really be settling down to some cocoa and a Shadows Boxed Set of an evening but to no avail. There was one more name he had to tell me about. ‘They are called A New International,’ he intoned confidentially. The next day a message arrives via messenger….’Re: A new International. Listen to Under The Candle Window…the major groove is Jaques Brel meets Ennio Morriocone in Barcelona in 1937, lyrics by George Orwell.’

Let’s face it if that was your band’s PR statement in the 80’s you’d have been on the cover of the NME before you’d even rehearsed. Fortunately for us this band have done way more than rehearse. After I’d listened to the track and album that Craig recommended I was so enthusiastic I declared…take me to a gig. He’d already though of that. We would go with our respective wives to see ‘ANI’ live on a forthcoming Saturday to the CCA to see them. A Saturday? I was nervous….would Mrs Ross accept the potential of a busman’s holiday on a precious weekend night?

As it turned out it was one of the best nights of the year. The band were gloriously wonderful and the gig was the most dangerous, strange and heartbreakingly beautiful event I have seen all year. It started and ended with a monologue by lead singer Biff…..need you hear more? If you do they are our special BBC introducing guests this Tuesday on Another Country. It will be unmissable…so please don’t!

Another Country will be live from 9 pm on BBC Radio Scotland.

Last week I received one of these phone calls where you know you are going to get bad news. It was my old chum Davie Scott telling me about the very untimely death of Stewart Cruickshank.

By now you’ll probably have read or heard some fine obituaries to Stewart. It seems as if there’s no one in music in Scotland who hadn’t encountered Stewart in his role as a radio producer. Simply put – everyone loved him. I never doubted that but only realised how far his reach was after I saw the disparate places from which tributes poured in. Folk singers, rock bands, alt sound sculptors, radio people, record people…People!

I had probably met Stewart before this but I distinctly remember meeting him around 23 years ago on Byres Road. (where else) in Glasgow. I was pushing a pram containing my daughter, Emer around the west end – having a long walk before she was due to go home to get fed. It was early autumn and, as a new father again I felt very far from making music although, as I remember now, I was in the middle of completing a new album and about to release a single. As I bumped into Stewart and he offered me the usual congratulations I caught up with what he was up to. ‘Oh we’ve just been recording a session with Alex Chilton and Teenage Fanclub.’

‘Here?’ I asked.

He pointed back at the old BBC over the road and nodded. He started to chuckle with delight and I joined in. I loved the idea of these magical radio events happening as I quietly got on, streets away, with important domestic matters.

In the early days I really didn’t know much about music at BBC Radio Scotland. We’d always had great support from other commercial stations here and RS was good at supporting indy music and we didn’t really fit that bill so I experienced less of their involvement than I would if music had taken a different direction. But after the demise of the first chapter of Deacon Blue I found myself going into the building more and more for various radio shows. Stewart was always there, looking as if he’s just come out of an all night edit. If tape wasn’t hanging around his shoulders it should have been.

One day we had coffee and I told him how, having once been asked to host a show on the radio, I’d got the bug. I decided to ask him if he’d be interested in me doing anything. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. A few months later, and the conversation almost forgotten the phone rang. It was Stewart asking me to sit in for Iain Anderson. I was willing but very, very nervous. ‘It’s like doing a gig,’ he told me – and he knew a bit about that – ‘You say something, then when the time feels right you play the music.’ None of that probably seems like rocket science but, in its simple wisdom, it explains how good music radio should sound and it’s how I’ve approached it these last eight years or so.

In between times I’ve met Stewart over at Bees Nees and he never disappointed. Whatever we were meant to be talking about it always returned to music, records, artists…the stuff we both loved. No one I knew expected to lose Stewart so early. I always assumed we’d have that long conversation we must have been due. I know there are artists I still need to listen to who Stewart could have recommended…I’ll need to find them myself now. As I write I’m drinking a very small glass of red wine before my last UK tour show. I’m raising a toast to him alone. Isn’t that how we enjoy the radio best? Tonight I’ll say a few words then play some music when it seems like the right thing to do. On the Radio this Tuesday I’ll do the same thing. Join me from 9 this Tuesday evening if you can on BBC Radio Scotland

In  early 1972 I was a year and a half into second year at secondary school. My world was very simple; it was all about football. On Saturdays we’d watch it and every night in the park we’d play it. There was no Sky – only football focus and a weekly Magazine called Goal, which I saw as infinitely superior to the down-market Shoot. Oh, then there was Subbuteo. It was our FIFA 15 and every Xbox rolled into one.

Music was there but it was on in the background. So records and the radio were played as the Subbuteo pitch was going down on the bedroom carpet. The radio too was straightforward. By day Radio 1 then later the third preset button on our Bush transistor – 208 MW – Radio Luxembourg – when Radio One became Radio 2 and stopped playing the songs we wanted to hear.

This was the background to my two worlds coming together. In the early part of that year a song came on the radio that got inside my head. It was Heart of Gold by Neil Young. It never made me the Neil Young fan I am now, I never bought it and I didn’t buy the album it came from until three or four years later but it registered with me. Neil Young, in my book was a lanky centre forward for Manchester City who had memorably scored the winner in the FA Cup Final just before I had gone to secondary school……..What, he’s now a singer too?

It didn’t take long to sort out the confusion and my friends, and particularly my great friend Pete from Carnoustie would put me right by pointing out that this was the very same Young as formed the great Crosby,Stills,Nash and Young, and heck there was much more to him than this. It was that other stuff that intrigued me and in 1975 when I finally caught up with all of it Tonight’s The Night became my record. I was enthralled by it’s deep darkness, the tales of rock ‘n’ roll deaths and rolling mythology which involved tales of his visit to Scotland to play the record before anyone had ever heard it.

Why do I tell you this? Because on this week’s AC we pay tribute to Neil Young as he turns 70. For me that’s significant, as I pointed out to a rather bemused listener who questioned our reasoning, because without Neil I doubt whether I’d have the love of country I have today. It was th plaintive pedal steel on Tonight’s The Night that drew me in. I didn’t have to look far to find Helpless, that aching back roads lament or the bitter roots of For The Turntstiles, LA, Harvest itself to know I liked the sound that Neil harked back to. But more, if it wasn’t for Neil how would I know who Don Gibson was and would I ever have been drawn to the music of Bobby Bare had Neil not first let me hear Four Strong Winds? I doubt it.

So for two hours this week join us in a very country toast to the seventy year old Neil Young.

It all starts tonight, Tuesday, on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine. Join if you can.

One of the few things you learn as you get older is that you have to let things go. If you’re lucky to have children or make pieces of art the chances are both will eventually be claimed by others as ‘theirs.’ Songs are really the best example: People will often tell me that  a song I wrote many years ago is really ‘Our song.’

‘We met when it was playing.’ ‘We danced to it at the wedding and hey…it was on the labour tape.’ It follows that it will eventually be played at the funeral ….though unlikely to be played at mine (I hope).

This week I’ve had a couple of close encounters with the power of song. Leaving my songs with a company of actors is an interesting experience and watching my first musical take shape and come alive with a brilliant cast has made me realise that, despite their considerable skill, the song really has to stand up on its own. On Sunday I began a short tour which sees me perform on stage on my own for an entire show for the first time in a long time. There’s very little to it: I sit down at the piano and play a few songs and do the same with the guitar for a wee while then we all go home. I realised long ago that there is no dry-ice to hide behind and very little of any other theatrical magic to embellish the gig. It was of no small comfort for me to hear, therefore, people come up to me after the show to tell me how much a particular song meant to them. To them and to me I was really there to bring that song to life and I was grateful to be the guy who could take them to that special place. Perhaps hearing it in its most rudimentary form reminded people what they liked about the thing in the first place.

I say all this because, once more, on Tuesday night we will get a chance to play you a few things that have lasted a life-time and have wormed their way into people’s hearts and we will also suggest a few things which might too end up being as loved.

We’ll have some beautiful old treasures from The Stanley Brothers,Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, The Judds and Hank Williams and we’ll celebrate some future classics from Ten String Symphony, Tiny Ruins, Rab Noakes and Deerhunter. We’ll get round to playing some requested material and we’ll think a little about songs from behind bars as we celebrate a new writing project where prisoners have cowritten some songs with professional songwriters with some beautiful outcomes. It gives me a chance to celebrate this vinyl offering too…..

If that’s not enough more lovely vinyl from the Wynntown Marshals and Neil Young.

It all starts at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

I often say that certainly smells remind me of happiness. I think a certain shop in Greenhills Mall in Nashville used to spray around so much scent that any hint of it anywhere in the world made me think of Music City. There’s another thing; it’s the opening chords to Jesus Take The Wheel, Carrie Underwood’s massive song from 2005 which was all over country radio when I first visited there. Put the two things together and you might never get me back. And what do I think of when I think of these memories? I think of happiness and how much I loved being in the city of so many songwriters and musicians, the city I’d always dreamed of visiting. Heck, way back in 1985, I signed a publishing deal to ATV Songs whose embossed note paper declared they had offices in London, LA, New York and Nashville. It was Nashville that carried the greatest allure.

When I finally got there (two music publishing deals later) all I wanted to do was drive around and listen to the radio. The radio didn’t disappoint, though it took me a while to find out what was what there was one constant factor; Carrie Underwood’s So Small was on heavy rotation and I fell for all of it. From there it was an easy step to catch up with Carrie. She had exploded onto the Country community two years previously after an American Idol series where she established herself as America’s sweetheart and simultaneously reminded the mainstream pop audience that country was pop music for any good Texas girl.

Carrie had the wisdom and good luck to tap into some of the best of the city’s songwriting community.Brett James, Luke Laird, Hilary Lindsay, Gordie Sampson and in a cameo appearance at the end of that first album one Carrie Underwood. Since then Carrie has become a regular co-writer on her own songs and surpassed anything she’d set out to do on American Idol. So far she has picked up Seven Grammy Awards, seventeen Billboard Music Awards, eleven Academy of Country Music Awards, eight American Music Awards, five CMAs, amongst and as a songwriter, she has also received a Golden Globe Award nomination and won ten BMI awards. She’s still on 32 years old!

On Tuesday night you’ll not be surprised to learn that we devote our first hour to Carrie Underwood. We talk about the excellent new album, Storyteller (just out last Friday), we will hear how excited she is to be coming to Scotland for the first time and talk about her inspiration for those remarkable songs we have loved over the last 10 years. She’s one of the biggest country stars on the planet and she might well go on to surpass the achievements of the many legends who inspired her. Hear her first in-depth radio conversation about this new record on this Tuesday evening’s Another Country.

As well as this we will celebrate the return of Randy Newman to these parts, play you some excellent new music from Frankie Lee, Sarah Cracknell as well as Dave Rawlings Machine, about whom I will share with you a great family story. We do all of this in hours, you know.

Join us from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

twitter: @rickyaross  @richardpmurdoch @bbcradioscotland