One of the most overlooked albums of 2011--at least by year end reviews--was Lucinda Williams' "Blessed."
A road trip through the soul, "Blessed" features the evocative ballad "Kiss Like Your Kiss" which I hear in blues-jazz singer Etta James who died early Friday Jan. 20. (My full appreciation appears in the Chicago Sun-Times).
The snow is flying in Chicago today. They are cold tears.

And Williams sings:
There'll never be a winter quite so true
When the sky was painted with gifts
There'll never be a moon so full & blue
There'll never be a kiss like your kiss.....................

There's a lotta Etta in Lucinda, especially in the ballad as true as James' "At Last.".....

NORFOLK, Va.--A long time ago Bruce Springsteen said rock is "the music of survival." Over the weekend core members of the Asbury Park, N.J. rock scene gathered in Norfolk to pay tribute to E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

Clemons died in June of complications from a stroke. He was 69. Clemons was born and raised in Norfolk County, now known as the City of Chesapeake. The connection between Norfolk and New Jersey is correct and on Saturday night a full moon hit all the right notes on the Chesapeake Bay.

The joyful noise that rose out of Frank Guida's studio during the early 1960s in Norfolk was the root of the earliest versions of the E Street Band as well as Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.

You know the songs even if you don't know they came out of Norfolk..........:

The last time I talked to singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey was in the spring of 1994.
Chicago skies were full of temporary promise.

Morrissey was coming to the Old Town School of Folk Music to support his album "Night Train" and to conduct a two-hour songwriting workshop. I ranked Morrissey with John Prine, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan as America's best contemporary male singer-songwriters. Studs Terkel said of Morrissey, "his songs haunt me."

But Morrissey was under the radar.

He was so under the radar his sudden death on July 23, 2011 did not make national news. "The worst thing Bill did in his life was die on the same day Amy Winehouse died," his friend and former Chicago singer-songwriter Fred Koller quipped earlier this week. "It blew him off the charts.".............

WALCOTT, IA.---I don't know why I'm excited about trucks all of a sudden.
Tis' the season to get riggy.

I've always liked the sweaty sensory overload of a big truck stop; a place where you could pick up Merle Haggard CDs (and 8-tracks), Louis L'Amour paperbacks and a case of the cooties. You could throw on Brut from a cologne dispenser in the bathroom and buy a matching green gallon of Mountain Dew.

Earlier this month I visited the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, about 11 miles west of the Quad Cities and adjacent to the World's Largest (and cleanest) Truck Stop.

The truck stop covers nearly 200 acres with parking for 800 semis. The truck stop includes a 300-seat restaurant, 80-seat movie theater and 24 private showers. As much as I love truck stops, I have never taken a shower in a truck stop.

The museum has more than 100 trucks of all shapes and sizes in this museum. I spent two hours there........

The deep grooves of Chicago's Record Row will never go away.
Like waves from Lake Michigan, American roots music roared out of South Michigan Avenue from the late 1950s through the 1970s.

Popular music would be changed forever.

Nick Lowe is best associated with pure pop for now people.

But his most stunning composition is arguably "The Beast In Me," popularized as a desperate ballad on Johnny Cash's 1994 "American Recordings" record for Lost Highway. Producer Rick Rubin exorcised the burning quest for redemption of "The Beast In Me" from Cash's profound soul.

Between 1979 and 1990 Lowe was married to Cash's daughter Carlene Carter (the daughter of June Carter Cash and country singer Carl Smith) so he had in inside take on the Man in Black......