Blue & Lonesome by The Rolling Stones
"Blue & Lonesome" is a covers album by the Rolling Stones—their 23rd British and 25th American studio album—released on 2 December 2016, through Interscope Records. It is the band's first album to feature only cover songs. It is their first studio release since 2005's A Bigger Bang. This is the first album since Dirty Work to not feature any guitar playing from Jagger (who instead concentrates completely on vocals and harmonica) and also the first since It's Only Rock 'n Roll to not feature a lead vocal from Richards. During its first week the album moved 106,000 sales to debut at number 1 on the UK Albums Chart, the second-highest opening sales week for an album in the UK in 2016. It also debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 with 123,000 album-equivalent units, of which 120,000 were pure album sales.
Though the term "outlaw country" wasn’t yet coined when Johnny Cash recorded <i>At Folsom Prison</i> in 1968, it's tough to imagine a more literal example. Cash’s status as a country superstar was fading by the late ’60s, but the raw excitement and immediacy of the album he made in front of a roomful of convicts at California's Folsom State Prison brought him back into the spotlight and earned him a whole new audience. Cash started his sets for years with one of his first big hits, 1955’s stark jailhouse tale "Folsom Prison Blues", and naturally that song kicks things off here. <br /> Cash had always shunned the trappings of stardom, and his uncompromising, black-clad, champion-of-the-underdog persona and rough-edged style helped him connect with the Folsom prisoners. With his faithful Tennessee Three offering their typically terse, barbed-wire backing, Cash sounds energised by the event. He throws himself into tough-minded stompers like "Cocaine Blues" and the death-row rave-up "25 Minutes to Go" with wild-eyed abandon, sometimes sounding nearly unhinged. <br /> He leans hard into prison-themed tunes like "I Got Stripes" and "Greystone Chapel" (the latter written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley), giving them a superhuman degree of gravitas. He even finds time to lighten things up with the jokey (but still suitably gritty) "Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog" and "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart". Cash would go on to record more prison concert albums, including 1969's legendary <i>At San Quentin</i>, but before <i>Folsom</i>, nobody would have pegged a state pen as a catalyst for an iconic performance, much less a career turnaround.
