That Nashville Sound Saturday Newsbytes - New Music Videos & New Albums From Ray Wylie Hubbard & Crystal Shawanda

Things around the world seem to be trending in the right direction. With rare exception, hospitals are far less busy than they thought they might be and the estimates that experts are throwing around for COVID-19 fatalities drops by the day.  Hopefully, we can continue this trend and get our music venues open sooner than later so our favorite artists can do what they do.

~ Fresh off a new record deal with Big Machine Records, Texas legend Ray Wylie Hubbard announced that his July 10 release will be a star-studded affair called "Co-Starring."  The renegade poet as a roadhouse saint brought together an eclectic mix of guests for Co-Starring, his first ever high-profile label release. Ringo Starr, Joe Walsh, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Ronnie Dunn, Don Was, Larkin Poe, Pam Tillis and The Cadillac Three were just a few who clamored to jam, sing and generally be in the studio with the wizened icon.
Included are bluegrass/folk legend Peter Rowan on the tender “Hummingbird,” emerging Nashville renegade Ashley McBryde on the tough girl homage “Outlaw Blood,” SiriusXM femme fatales Paula Nelson and Elizabeth Cook on the randy “Drink ‘Til I See Double” or the trippy rocker Aaron Lee Tasjan on the elegiac “Rock Gods."

~ Jamie Lin Wilson covered John Prine this week.  As usual, she's divine on "You Got Gold."

~ Tim McGraw released a video shot last year with him covering "All The Gold in California" with LOCASH.

~ Jack Ingram went to Facebook with a new track appropriate for the times called "Times Like These."

~ Jason Eady (with an assist from his bride Courtney Patton) played an hour and a half of songs that influenced his own songwriting from his living room.

~ First Nation artist Crystal Shawanda has released a new blues album called Church House Blues.  Shawanda is an Indigenous musician, who grew up on the Wikwemikong reserve on an island in Ontario, Canada. Her parents taught her to sing and play guitar and encouraged her to play country songs, but she grew up in a home filled with the music her oldest brother loved most: the blues.

She was signed as country artist to RCA Records in 2007 producing a Top 20 hit on country radio, sold over 50,000 copies in the US, went Top 20 on Billboard’s Country Albums chart, but left Crystal feeling like a fish out of water. While on the road promoting the album, visiting
radio stations she wrote “The Whole World’s Got the Blues,” inspired by the music she loved to overhear in her youth. She told RCA Nashville she wanted to make blues albums, formed her own label and began making the blues music that to Crystal, is her true calling.

Now signed to True North Records, Church House Blues is Crystal’s fourth blues album. Crystal has performed for the Obamas in the 2013 Inauguration and she has served as a board of director for Nike 7 for the past 11 years.

~ New music videos over the last couple days:

      Ray Scott - "Wander"
      Kip Moore - "Southpaw"
      Abby Anderson - "I'll Still Love You"
      Darrell Scott - "Lost Highway"
      Jamie Lin Wilson - "Death and Life"
      Lucas and Willie Nelson & Family - "Just Outside of Austin"
      Ray Wylie Hubbard - "Bad Trick"