Guest Mixtape: Grand Ole Echo's Roots Roadhouse

Grand Ole Echo is the Los Angeles Americana and roots music night that has been running long enough to have its own canon. The night happens monthly and the room it draws is the community of people in Los Angeles who take country, folk, and roots music seriously: musicians, writers, photographers, the people who make the records and the people who care most about them.

The Roots Roadhouse guest mixtape is Grand Ole Echo's selection for this site. The criteria are simple: the songs that work in the room, the songs that the community returns to, the songs that demonstrate why this music matters in a city that is not Nashville and not New York and has its own relationship to the American musical tradition.

Los Angeles and Americana

Los Angeles has a long and underacknowledged history in Americana and country music. The Bakersfield sound — the harder, twangier alternative to Nashville polish that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s — was made primarily in and around Los Angeles by musicians who had migrated from the South and Midwest. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard are the names most associated with Bakersfield, but the scene was broader than any two artists.

The country-rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was largely a Los Angeles project. The Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt — the synthesis of country and rock that defined the early Americana sound happened in studios and clubs in and around Hollywood.

Grand Ole Echo is part of a continuity with that history. The room acknowledges what came before it.

The Roots Roadhouse selection

The tracks that define the Grand Ole Echo room draw from across the roots music spectrum:

• Merle Haggard — "Mama Tried" (the Bakersfield baseline)
• Flying Burrito Brothers — "Hot Burrito #1" (the country-rock foundation)
• Emmylou Harris — "Boulder to Birmingham" (the Harris voice as gold standard)
• Townes Van Zandt — "Pancho and Lefty" (the song that survives any arrangement)
• Guy Clark — "Desperados Waiting for a Train" (the Texas singer-songwriter tradition)
• Gillian Welch — "Everything Is Free" (the contemporary account of what the tradition means now)
• Lucinda Williams — "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" (the record that defined what Americana could be)
• Ryan Adams — "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)" (the moment of transition, early career)
• Neko Case — "Deep Red Bells" (the country-noir tradition running)
• Blaze Foley — "Clay Pigeons" (the songwriter's songwriter, the song that keeps getting rediscovered)

The room

What distinguishes a genuine music community from a collection of music listeners is shared taste refined over time through communal experience. Grand Ole Echo has been building that shared taste for years.

The Roots Roadhouse selection is not a list of the objectively best songs in the tradition — that list would look different. It is a list of what works in the room, what creates the feeling the room is designed to create.

Full Mixtapes archive.