Kyle Cantrell, host of XM Satellite Radio’s Bluegrass Junction (track 14), passed along news about a few special programs and features coming up this week on XM.

The current edition of Studio Special, XM’s live-in-the studio bluegrass show, airs tonight (11/5) at 8:00 p.m. Cherryholmes is the featured guest, offering both live performance and some chit chat with Kyle during the program. It re-airs on Wednesday (11/7) at midnight (technically 11/8), and again on Thursday afternoon (11/8) at 3:00 p.m.

Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. finds Kyle with Frank Ray of Cedar Hill for a track-by-track run through of their latest release, Poverty Row. That show will re-air on Sunday (11/11) at noon, on 11/14 at 9:00 a.m. and on 11/16 at 3:00 a.m.

On Wednesday (11/7), bluegrass legend Curley Seckler will join Kyle in the studio for a live interview.

Then on Friday (11/9), Studio Special is rebroadcasting a live studio appearance from the US Navy bluegrass band Country Current in honor of Veterans Day. That show will also air on Saturday (11/10) at 6:00 p.m., on 11/12 at 8:00 p.m., 11/13 at midnight and on 11/15 at 3:00 p.m. All times for all shows are EST.

Kyle also passed along Bluegrass Junction’s Top 40 chart for November ‘07, based on October listener requests and how often individual albums were featured.

The top 5 albums for October were:

You can see the full Top 40 chart on the Bluegrass Junction web site. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see a link to download the chart as a PDF file.

Our UK correspondent, Richard F Thompson, shares this review.

Cedar Hill is renowned for its adherence to the ultra-traditional style of bluegrass and nothing much has changed with the group’s switch from Hay Holler Records to the recently-formed Blue Circle Records label .

The latest release, Poverty Row (Blue Circle BCR-011), serves as a showcase for fiddler Lisa Ray’s crystal clear and emotive lead singing, more Rhonda Vincent than Alison Krauss in character. Ms Ray is featured in that role on no less than eight of the 12 tracks and two of those are instrumentals. Her voice is keening on the driving opening track, plaintive on the title song, another classic from the pens of Miss Dixie and Tom T Hall and melodious on another great Hall-written number, Big Blue Roses that bears all the hallmarks of a top-notch country song of the 1950s, both in its writing and its performance. Ferrell Stowe’s resophonic guitar playing is a significant factor in creating that sound. Apparently, folks have been asking for awhile now to hear more of Lisa’s vocals and nobody can be disappointed by those three opening tracks.

There’s two instrumentals, the quaintly titled Whiskers In The Sink, by Lisa Ray, which has the hallmarks of those swinging fiddle numbers that Kenny Baker led back in the days of his tenure as a Blue Grass Boy, and Soldier’s Joy, with clawhammer banjo from guest Bobby Minner, who with Ronnie Bowman wrote the closing number, Blood Stained Bible, which relates a story about an Army Chaplain involved in the Normandy troop landing.

Rob Collins shows that he has a fine voice on two numbers, the country standard, Love Gone Cold and Call Me Gone, one of two songs that the songwriter Frank Ray calls, “light hearted songs.” (more…)