Alison Krauss and Robert Plant were featured on the BBC One TV programme Later …. With Jools Holland on Tuesday night, May 6.

The duo, currently on tour in Europe performed two songs, Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On) and One Woman Man.

Holland conducted a brief interview with the couple also during the half hour show. Also on Tuesday’s programme was Emmylou Harris, accompanied by Buddy Miller, singing Gold.

Krauss and Plant, who were supported by the likes of T Bone Burnett, Dennis Crouch, Stuart Duncan, Jay Bellerose and Buddy Miller, will be guests of Jools Holland again on BBC Two Friday, May 9, 11.35 p.m. (GMT), during which they will sing Killing The Blues.

The Later show posted a preview clip on their web site from tomorrow night’s show.

Alison Krauss & Robert Plant will be performing a concert in Chattanooga, TN on Wednesday of this week, and our good friend Wichita Rutherford is giving away four tickets to the show. He’s giving them away in pairs so there will be two winners who receive two tickets each.

You’ll have to hurry to win though, entry in the contest ends at 4PM CST today. He’s made the entry interesting, it’s not as simple as just filling out a zip code and email address. You’ll have to work for it bit.

Visit Wichita’s Blog for more details.

Yeah, yeah…  I know - it’s not bluegrass. But a lot of readers here on The Bluegrass Blog follow Alison Krauss’ music wherever it may take her.

Sales of her new CD with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, have made it plain that the pairing is on to something, being recently certified as platinum (1,000,000 copies sold) by the RIAA.

The second music video from the album has been released, and can be viewed on the Rounder Records web site. It’s for the song, Please Read The Letter, written by Plant and former Led Zeppelin band made Jimmy Page. The video was shot in LA by director Rocky Schenck.

The rock music blogosphere is buzzing with the news that Robert Plant has reportedly turned down the notion of a Led Zeppelin reunion tour, preferring to focus his attention on his newfound musical partnership with Alison Krauss. Their duet CD, Raising Sand, was released on Rounder in October of 2007.

A story published over the weekend in England’s Sunday Mirror claims in an exclusive that…

Robert Plant has turned down an extra £100million fortune to take Led Zeppelin on a world tour.

The rock legend wants to concentrate on his new partnership with US country singer Alison Krauss… spelling the likely end of the famous band.

Zeppelin fans are not pleased.

Read the brief Mirror piece online.

Tonight (2/11) is the first airing of the episode of CMT Crossroads featuring Robert Plant and Alison Krauss performing the music from their duo release, Raising Sand.

Crossroads has long had as its theme combining artists from different backgrounds to perform each other’s material live on stage, and the Plant/Krauss collaboration will be no exception. In addition to several songs from Raising Sand, the show will feature revised arrangements of Led Zeppelin classics and popular songs from recent AKUS projects.

Tonight’s broadcast is scheduled for both 1:00 and 8:00 p.m., with encore presentations on 2/15 at 3:00 p.m., 2/17 at 10:00 a.m. and 2/19 at 1:00 p.m. All times ET/PT.

CMT has a video preview available on their site, featuring the pair on the Everly Brothers’ Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On), the first single from the new CD, which was awarded the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals trophy at last night’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Tickets for the two week Robert Plant and Alison Krauss European tour go on sale today (12/14).

There are currently 12 dates booked in May of 2008, with four shows in England amidst stops in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Norway.

The touring band has not been announced, but we hope to get those details soon.

Bluegrass has been getting cozy with the guys from Led Zeppelin recently. From the success of the duet album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, to John Paul Jones producing Uncle Earl, the connection is there.

The rock band of legend just performed their first full concert in 27 years at the O2 Arena in London, UK, Monday night. This was a full on rock concert, but the bluegrass connection was still alive.

We just heard from our friend Scott Rouse, the Nashville producer responsible for the Blue Highway CD MarbleTown, who was at the show courtesy of John Paul Jones himself.

John Paul Jones invited his bluegrass buddies to London for the Zeppelin show. He gave us killer seats. John’s wife, Mo, really took great care of us all. Here’s me, Paczosa, Ronnie and Rob. We all got backstage after show passes and had a blast. The Bluegrass contingent was full on.

From what Scott tells me, the whole bunch headed over to Jones’ house for a jam session after the concert. So who’s the “whole bunch” you ask?

• John Cowan
• Bela Fleck
• the Uncle Earl girls
• Ronnie & Rob McCoury
• Gary Paczosa
• Scott Rouse
• David Ferguson
• John Carter Cash and Laura Cash
• Chris Eldridge

Sounds like a jam I would have liked to heard!

The first single from the new Robert Plant and Alison Krauss CD, Raising Sand, is for the song, Gone, Gone, Gone. The world premier of the music video for the single will be on November 29 on CMT’s Top 20 Countdown.

The show’s format is the familiar countdown to number one, with choices for favorite videos each week being partly determined by online voting. The Gone, Gone, Gone video is set to enter CMT in a medium-heavy rotation, with better than 20 airings weekly.

We have received a number of press releases suggesting that the video will air at 4:00 p.m. on 12/29, but the CMT site indicates that Top 20 Countdown is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. that day.

The video should be available for online viewing after the TV debut.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will be among the guests on The Charlie Rose Show aired today (11/13) on most PBS television stations. They will be on to discuss their new CD, Raising Sand, along with producer T. Bone Burnett.

Times vary in different markets, so be sure to check the TV schedule for your area if you would like to catch the show.

Online video of recent shows is available on the show’s web site, so the Krauss/Plant/Burnett may appear there in a few days should you miss the discussion when it airs on PBS.

Of this fall’s new releases, few have received as much attention in the music business press as Raising Sand from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, just out on Rounder Records. The notion of the sweet-voiced bluegrass balladeer teamed with the former Led Zeppelin vocalist, and super-hot producer T-Bone Burnett was too tempting to resist, and speculation about the album’s likely success has been a hot topic since its release was announced by Rounder back in August.

It seems that the media interest has been reflected among music consumers, and after one week in release, Raising Sand has made an impressive debut on the Billboard charts. The CD shows up as the #1 Rock Album for the past week, and #2 in the Top 200 Albums, Country Albums, Internet Sales and Digital Sales.

This isn’t a recording that grabs you by the shoulders and hits you over the head from the first track - nor is it a bluegrass project by any stretch (obligatory disclaimer). The music is subtle - and genre-bending - with producer Burnett using an interesting layered approach to the use of the primarily acoustic instruments in the mix.

Percussion is generally muted and understated, and the quirky rhythms typical of Led Zeppelin can be found. But so can Krauss’ trademark soft-sung sound, an approach that commands your attention as surely as Plant’s early wails with Led Zep ever did.

Find more details on the CD on the duo’s new web site, where you can also hear the entire CD online, and see for yourself whether the music calls to you.

The pair have been making media appearances in London this week, after doing the same in the US last week. They have taped an episode for The Charlie Rose Show, and a performance for CMT Crossroads, both due to air in the near future. Their recent interview with NPR’s Studio 360, where they discuss how the pairing came to be and how the recording progressed, can be accessed online.

This Saturday (11/3), Sirius Satellite Radio subscribers can hear an hour-long interview with Plant and Krauss on Sirius Disorder (channel 70) at 4:00 p.m., with rebroadcasts on Sunday (11/4) at 6:00 p.m. and Monday (11/5) at 2:00 p.m. All times eastern.

We’ve got a stack of new recordings to check out during the drive to Nashville, and we’ll pass along some comments during the week.

In the stack are Raising Sand from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Bill Emerson & The Sweet Dixie Band, and John Sebastian & David Grisman along with several others.

We also just received the next two DVDs in the Flatt & Scruggs TV Show series - but we’ll have to get to the hotel to give those a look.

Rounder has posted audio samples online from their upcoming Robert Plant/Alison Krauss release, due October 23. Bluegrass purists may argue that information about this CD has no place on The Bluegrass Blog, as there is little - if any - bluegrass music to be found there.

And they would be half right. Raising Sand is a departure from Krauss’ bluegrass outings, but the truth is that it is much closer to one of her recordings than anything Plant recorded with Led Zeppelin, from whence most fans of pop or rock music will know his work.

Some of the music does reflect Plant’s folk leanings, which popped up occasionally on Zep records and his later albums, but the publicity materials for the new collaboration give much of the credit to celebrated producer, T. Bone Burnett.

It all began quietly, in Alison’s Nashville home. Sitting side by side, with Burnett quietly lining out chord changes on guitar, Plant and Krauss sang. There were no microphones, no effects – nothing to hide behind or escape into. “The idea was to take them both out of their comfort zone,” Burnett reflects. “To take us all out of our comfort zones.” As one of the finest harmony singers in any style of music, Krauss worked carefully with Plant to develop a blend, telepathically following the contours of his phrasing. New to such intensive two-part harmony, Plant paired down his vocal style to its most basic components – resulting in some of the most affecting, soulful singing he has yet captured on tape. “I don’t get nervous really,” Plant said of those early sessions. “But I realized once I started sitting down on that couch, I was in for a ride.” As they grew more comfortable with the songs and the way their voices complimented one another, they stepped into the studio….

Burnett had assembled an intriguing group of musicians, with a core of guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Dennis Crouch, and drummer Jay Bellerose occasionally augmented by guitarist Norman Blake and multi-instrumentalist Mike Seeger. Caution and trepidation gave way to an amazingly fruitful run of sessions, spanning only ten days but resulting in almost the entire album. Burnett nurtured the music endlessly, encouraging the musicians to disregard the past and simply play the songs their way. The sound gelled quickly, as a roomful of strangers became an empathetic, organically telepathic band in a matter of hours.

Another interesting note about Raising Sand is that Rounder plans to release it on both audio CD and vinyl LP formats.

Check out the audio samples at Rounder.com, and see if you think it should be covered here.

UPDATE 12:30 p.m.: Thanks to a commenter on an earlier post, we found this video that Rounder created as a promo for the CD. It features a discussion with Robert and Alison, along with some audio previews from the CD.

Rounder Records has announced October 23 as the release date for the new project from Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Raising Sand, a seemingly unlikely pairing of the whispery-voiced bluegrasser with the former Led Zeppelin vocalist, was produced by T-Bone Burnett.

The material is said to include blues, country, folk and R&B songs with a variety of arrangements and settings to highlight these two unique vocal stylists. Rounder says that the CD will feature both duet and solo vocal tracks for each, as well as at least one piece with tight, brother duet harmony throughout.

One Led Zeppelin song, Please Read The Letter, which Plant penned with Zep guitarist Jimmy Page, made the cut along with a Rolling Stones cover, a Doc Watson song and an Everly Brothers remake.

I’ve seen no official word on a Krauss/Plant tour in support of this release, but with members of Union Station having the year 2008 off, could that be in the works?