String Theory Media

Peter LaFarge at the Nashville Film Festival

We're happy to announce that our co-production  with Sandra Hale Schulman,"The Ballad of Peter LaFarge" has been accepted at the Nashville  Film Festival. Sandra has been researching the story of this little-known but much appreciated songwriter for years. This short film blends her research about this complicated, free-spirited, difficult artist with rare archival photos, many of which have never been published before. Americana songwriter Kevin Welch narrates. LaFarge is most famous for writing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," which was recorded by Johnny Cash and many others. Bob Dylan was a big LaFarge fan, and in many ways LaFarge embodied the political awareness and anything-goes mentality of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. The film screens on April 24 at 9:25 and April 25 at 2:00 in advance of "Far Off Town: From Dunedin to Nashville." Hope you can make it. CPH

A CD from the boundaries of bluegrass

I've been working on a lot of artist bios and liner notes recently. One of those pieces I wanted to post here. It's the expanded version of liner notes coming soon in the sophomore release by Alecia Nugent on Rounder Records. I didn't have to blow any hot air into my enthusiasm for this project, and repeated listening just deepens how good I think this CD is.  - CPH

If you live in Nashville and you chase good music for fun or profit, you’re going to hear more strong female voices than you’d ever dream could exist under one sun. Some days it seems like everyone can sing like a bird or an angel or some other tortured metaphor. Like pretty faces, pretty throats are commonplace. Harder to find and more to be cherished are singers who mesh with their material - artists who take you into the inner sanctum of a song and show you more spacious rooms there than you could have found on your own.

Ever larger numbers of music fans are discovering that Alecia Nugent is that kind of vocal artist. Upon the release of her debut album on Rounder Records in 2004, word spread fast that this fresh face and voice from the unlikely bluegrass cradle of rural Louisiana had the kind of power and sensitivity we associate with the legends. To festival goers in her region she was a local treasure, but to the rest of the bluegrass world, she was a rumor. Then a series of now-familiar events brought her to the wider world, not as a new teen prodigy but a fully realized artist with life experience and something to say.

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