Cat No MANTCD030

Popular culture moves in strange ways. A few years ago traditional bluegrass and old time country music were largely considered dead musical genres. Then the soundtrack to the movie ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ becomes the leftfield country music smash, selling over two million CDs. The music recreated for the movie was the primal sounds of rural blacks and whites in the US South across the ‘20s & ‘30s. Across the 20th Century this music has echoed with immense resonance.

Lonesome Valley gathers many of the greatest hillbilly pioneers – the sound of a rural America that barely exists today. We trace their influence through to the country rock and bluegrass movements that exploded out of California in the late 1960s. People might want to forget the past - especially a past that smells of moonshine, mule shit and poverty - but it is the psyche of these songs, the shadows they cast across our homogenised culture, which keep drawing us back. Gimme that old time religion? Resonance, baby, resonance.