Charles Richard Livesay

Charles Richard Livesay is a teacher and football coach who listens to music pretty much nonstop. He spends way too much time with his record collection, but he refuses to admit it. He lives outside Knoxville with his family. He has a blog at www.songsthatstuck.blogspot.com and his Twitter, which he sometimes struggles to understand, is @clivesay7433.

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Justin Timberlake

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Jan 312016
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

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Justin Timberlake shouldn’t be what he is. Starting out in a boy band doesn’t normally signal the beginning of a long career. N’Sync was, like most boy bands before them, a meteor, designed to burn hot and then disappear. But a funny thing happened: Justin Timberlake emerged out of what was left and got to work transforming himself into a star.

When N’Sync put itself on the shelf in 2002, Justin responded by putting out his first solo album, Justified. He made no secret of his ambitions, stating he’d like to pattern himself after Michael Jackson. A lofty goal, but Timberlake put the time in, touring hard and putting out danceable tunes with wide appeal. His next album, though, would put the world on notice.
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In the Spotlight: Rosanne Cash

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Jan 272016
 

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

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Rosanne Cash, daughter of country legend Johnny Cash, has been putting out solo albums since 1978. Her work was widely lauded in the ’80s, starting with the commercial success of her 1981 album Seven Year Ache. In 1985, she won the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance for “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me,” and 1987 saw the release of her landmark album King’s Record Shop. The ’90s were a quieter time for Cash, but she came roaring back in the 2000s, eventually recording The List, a selection of covers taken from a list of great American and country songs given to her by her father. She followed that with 2014’s The River and the Thread, which earned her three more Grammys, including Best Americana Album.

It would have been easy for her to have just followed in her father’s footsteps, copying his musical style, but Rosanne Cash found her own voice. She helped make cowpunk popular early in her career, and her music has evolved organically ever since. Now she stands as one of the leading artists in Americana. She records songs that speak to Southern sensibilities without restricting themselves to the trappings of modern country music. She left Nashville a long time ago to live in New York, and letting that expanded worldview influence her music makes her one of the champions of her chosen field.
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Good, Better, Best: Sloop John B (The Beach Boys)

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Jan 182016
 

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

“Sloop John B” is a song that most of us have heard at least a few times in our lives. Popularized by the Beach Boys on their immortal Pet Sounds album, it has been around much longer than that. The song originally came out of the folk tradition in the Bahamas under the title “The John B. Sails.” It was transcribed as early as 1916 by Richard Le Galliene, but really came to fame in America when included by Carl Sandburg in his 1927 folk song collection The American Songbag.

From there, it was recorded multiple times over the years. Notable versions include artists as diverse as Dick Dale, Jimmie Rodgers (under the title “Wreck of the John B”), Johnny Cash (as “I Want To Go Home”), and the Kingston Trio. It was the Kingston Trio, who recorded the song as “(The Wreck of the) John B,” that had the largest influence on the Beach Boys’ take, which would explode in popularity all over the world.
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