Howdy! Please excuse the dust. We’re making improvements to the good old jcshepard.com. Stay tuned!!
Aztec, New Mexico, Comprehensive Plan
The City of Aztec and Consensus Planning hosted an online Public Meeting, July 30, 2020, for the Aztec Comprehensive Plan Update project. I worked in Aztec, New Mexico, on a temporary basis before I moved up to Pagosa Springs a few years ago. I worked on some Downtown Main Street projects and helped review some […]
Raton, New Mexico
Willow Springs stage station once provided respite at the southern base of Raton Pass for travelers on the Santa Fe Trail’s mountain cutoff. In 1879, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway set rails over the pass from Colorado and their division point became the City of Raton, New Mexico. Later, Interstate 25 connected Denver […]
Absaroka County, New Mexico
In 2004, author Craig Johnson created Sheriff Walt Longmire as the protagonist in his series of Western-crime novels set in fictional Durant, Wyoming, county seat of the equally fictional Absaroka County. Longmire is a crime fighter, but first and foremost his is a gentleman and a cowboy. Johnson has to date gifted us 21 books […]
Waiting on COVID
I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer before we get our kicks on Old Route 66. Be safe, be well, be prepared. (Photo credit to my son.) .
Corb Lund Live at the Launchpad on 2020-03-08
Corb Lund put on an amazing show on Central Avenue–Old Route 66–in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Sunday March 8th, 2020, just before we all went into nation-wide lockdown. Corb has a new album coming out, Agricultural Tragic, and I scored a pre-release copy at the show. Yeah band merch. Too many “country” artists are all […]
Grammys do Good, Ameripolitan Awards do Awesome
Dale Watson doesn’t much care for the “Americana” appellation, so he went and dubbed himself “Ameripolitan”. That’s a nod to the old “Countrypolitan” style of Chet Atkins’ 1960s’ Nashville Sound. Now I’m not much of a Chet Atkins fan of orchestrated pop country, but it’s still better than anything in 21st Century pop country. Dale […]
2019 Blog Posts in Review: JCShepard.com turns 10
It’s the end of the decade… or maybe that’s the end of 2020 instead of the beginning. Either way, jcshepard.com is 10-years old, a decade since we went online 1 January 2009. Happy birthday to the blog. In 2018, our site here had 1,400 visitors give about 6,200 views, with August 2018 garnering more clicks […]
JC’s Americana Top Tunes of 2019
The Year in Music for 2019 was dedicated to Guy Clark and Susanna Clark, with a coda for the late, great Townes Van Zandt. As soon as I heard about Steve Earle’s project to dedicate an album of covers to Guy Clark’s memory, I knew this would be my favorite recording of 2019. GUY held […]
No Depression 2019 Readers and Critics Favorite Albums
No Depression magazine started out covering “Alt.Country…whatever that is”. As such, they still cover, well, Alt.not-country but we’re not quite sure whatever that is”. No Depression isn’t an “Americana” magazine, but it isn’t NOT an “Americana” outlet either. Mostly, though, No Depression (like the namesake album by Uncle Tupelo) covers the sorta music I like […]