Hardly Strictly Bluegrass announces final 2019 lineup

Among the large contingent of talented songwriters who emerged in Texas in the 1980s and Nineties, Robert Earl Keen struck an unusual balance between sensitive story-portraits and raucous barroom fun. These two song types in Keen’s output were unified by a mordant sense of humor that strongly influenced the early practitioners of what would become known as alternative country music. Some people take up a life of playing music with the goal of someday reaching a destination of fame and fortune; but from the get-go, Keen just wanted to write and sing his own songs, and to keep writing and singing them for as long as possible.