June 23-29, 2005
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Twenty years out of Nashville, Laura Cantrell has kept her lilt and her soft, Southern disposition. (Bet that goes over big in Queens.) She's not a prolific songwriter she's limited herself to four credits on each of her four discs but the deep-digging roots DJ does right by her country-music foremothers. Her originals have paid respect to Bonnie Owens ("Queen of the Coast") and Molly O'Day ("Mountain Fern"); "California Rose," from her new Humming by the Flowered Vine (Matador), tells the story of hillbilly pioneer Rose Maddox. Cantrell's a creative interpreter (check out her lonely take on Lucinda Williams' long-lost "Letters" or her perversely upbeat arrangement of the murder ballad "Poor Ellen Smith"), but her combination of scholarship and empathy makes her that rarest of breeds: a compelling historian.
Mon., June 27, 8:30 p.m., $12, with Paul Burch, Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0770, www.tinangel.com.
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