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Songwriter Gretchen Peters, whose formidable catalog includes Martina McBride’s “Independence Day,” pays homage to one of her songwriting heroes with the forthcoming album The Night You Wrote That Song: The Songs of Mickey Newbury. Due May 15th on Peters’ Scarlet Letter Records, the LP was cut at the historic Cinderella Sound Studios near Nashville, where Newbury recorded several of his noteworthy and influential LPs including 1969’s Looks Like Rain and his highest-charting album, 1971’s Frisco Mabel Joy.

Peters’ tribute includes her stripped-down takes on a dozen Newbury classics, including...

In February 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash holed up in a Nashville studio for two days of loose, free-flowing sessions where they sang each other’s songs, jammed with rockabilly icon Carl Perkins, broke into spontaneous covers like “Mystery Train” and “You Are My Sunshine” and even wrote the the tune “Wanted Man” that Cash would debut at San Quentin prison just one week later. Their duet on “Girl From the North Country” appeared on Dylan’s LP Nashville Skyline later that April and select tracks from the sessions leaked...

The deepest mysteries of Bob Dylan’s monumental 1966 album Blonde on Blonde will never be solved. It’s impossible to fully explain a song as mystically beautiful as “Visions of Johanna,” and why would you want to, anyway? But in a new book, That Thin Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville and the Making of Blonde on Blonde, journalist Daryl Sanders digs as deep as anyone has into the album’s origins, especially the Nashville sessions at its core, as well as influences from the Beatles to Ronnie Milsap to Lightnin’ Hopkins.