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From left: Tim Sult, Dan Maines, Neil Fallon and Jean-Paul Gaster

Nearly 20 years since their inception, roots rockin' stoner metal outfit Clutch may have grown, but they have never wavered. Beginning in 1991 with groove-oriented funk 'n' roll, fast-forwarding to 2009's blues-based ninth album Strange Cousins from the West, Neil Fallon and co. have run the gamut between rock and metal, but have always done exactly what they wanted to do. Explains Fallon, "This is a band that ... made music for music's sake and wasn't interested in anything else other than improving itself and being sincere while doing it." As a further testament to that, Clutch have even formed their own label imprint as a vehicle for exercising their creativity, which -- in addition to Clutch's most recent releases -- has also spawned an instrumental project called the Bakerton Group. To learn about Fallon's philosophical take on his musical output and humble fascination with rock history, plus the inner workings of Clutch's latest record, stay tuned right here.

Xtina, Celine, Mariah and Elton are cool and all, but there's no beating them old school divas. Goddesses like Billie Holiday, Dusty Springfield and Gloria Gaynor utterly and totally epitomized concepts like grace and class. Plus, they all made some timeless music, from smoky, jazzy ballads to dancefloor anthems. For the perfect overview of history's greatest divas, dig into this killer playlist. May your beloved Rhapsody inspire you to party all night in a vintage sequined evening gown!

The world is still waiting for a definitive answer to the eternal question, "How old is old school?" But for the purposes of this playlist, let's say mid-'60s to mid-'80s, and let's include everything from gorgeous falsetto ballads to down-home Southern chitlin' circuit blues to wave-hands-in-the-air big-city disco to deadly deep-dish funk to even a couple movin'-on-up upper-middle-class strivers getting their grown-up suburbia on. At just 69 cents per song, how can you go wrong?

Dear Classic Rock DJ:

In the past week, your station has played "Layla" 17 times. Now I love Derek & the Dominoes (Jim Gordon is a total monster behind the kit) as much as the next schmo. But your station's programming doesn't make a lick of sense. You call yourselves the "home of rock 'n' roll," yet you've been regurgitating the same 100 tracks since 1984. Why not inject some fresh blood into your rotation? C'mon dude, live a little!

This will surely come off as uber presumptuous, but I've taken the liberty of putting together a handy-dandy playlist and song-by-song cheat sheet for you to take back to your program director. It is packed with cool young artists whose jams would sound just dynamite alongside titans like Bad Company and Floyd. For example, I’ve been cranking this tune by Susan Tedeschi called “Talking About.” This nuclear-powered sexpot howls like a cross between pre-adult contemporary Bonnie Raitt and Jeff Beck group-era Rod Stewart. Then there’s this nifty little group from Philly who go by the name Dr. Dog. Their tune “The Ark” has Elton John, Supertramp, Lennon and even old school Hall & Oates tattooed all over it.

Don't get me wrong: I love your station. You are the only folks in town who still play The Wall in its entirety, and that's totally awesome. But I just feel like it's time to hear some new rock 'n' rock from the "home of rock 'n' roll." Am I right or what?

Son House, Tuts Washington and Slim Harpo represent three distinctly different strains of blues music, a fact that shines a spotlight on the spray of styles that make up the genre. Here we’ve picked out an album from each artist, as well as that album’s attendant must-hear cuts for folks looking for an introduction to (or a reminder of) the enduring material these men set to tape. House works best when you’re alone, Washington goes well with one or two (or six) Pat O'Brien hurricanes and, with the right dance partner, Harpo will get you in heaps of trouble.

We get this list every week. It organizes the assets each artist has into a bunch of columns, in descending order by the amount of times people have searched for said artist. By assets I mean bio, sampler, reviewed albums, etc. You get the picture. The idea is for us to go through and either update stuff (Cliff Richard's sampler has gone untouched since 2001! This is unforgivable! Even scarier -- who the hell is Cliff Richard anyway?) or give assets to big names that have somehow fallen through the cracks over the years (Chubby Checker MUST have a bio). While Rhapsody does cater to the multitudes that only care about Jack Johnson and Taylor Swift, the truth is everybody who works here is a record geek of some kind, and though we spend an awful lot of space on Coldplay, most of us just want to write about Allen Toussaint all the time. So in an effort to save my ass from somebody here realizing they pay me for almost nothing, I have been poring over this list, trying to plug holes. This week I noticed, uh, several big-name blues artists without bios. And I know someone, somewhere still cares about blues. Anyway, here's a roundup of three blues legends you oughta know about if you don't already: Son House, Tuts Washington and Slim Harpo.

So maybe this is what Blue Öyster Cult meant by the red and the black. Mississippi Mudsharks’ Train Rolls On and Black Diamond Heavies' A Touch of Someone Else’s Class are both beat-your-face-in albums of the belligerent he-man blues-rock persuasion, and they also both sort of look alike! Red lettering on a black background -- especially on the album back covers, each of which is a top-to-bottom list of 11 songs. The Mudsharks’ front has a locomotive and the Heavies’ a drum set, but hey, let’s not quibble, folks.

Mississippi Mudsharks are three hefty dudes from, well, San Diego, actually; their frontman Scottie Blinn calls himself “Mad Dog.” Guests help out on pedal steel (two songs) and “chain” (one). Their album-opening title track ain’t quite the “Train Kept a Rollin’” it wishes it was, and neither is the bleh ballad called “Slow Rollin’” they close with. But in between, they’ve got shuffles evolving into badass boogie (“30 Weight Shuffle”), bike-leather rockabilly (“Crimson Sky” and “Devil’s Road”), and some gratifying Black Oak Arkansas and ZZ Top tendencies, the latter most notably in “Throw It in the Hole.” Best song titles: “Lakeside Redneck Shindig,” “Zombie Whip,” “Can’t Put Down the Drink.”

Maybe it just means I’m turning into an old grump, but 2008 will go down in history as the first year in memory that I actually wound up liking two albums by bands of white people that hit Billboard’s blues chart. First there was Too Slim and the Tail Draggers, from Seattle. Then there was The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, from Indiana. Both are trios, both spend a lot of time on the road, both play guitar better than they sing, both record for small labels, both I never heard of before this year, and both like to eat.

Even in the grits-and-gravy world of chitlin circuit Southern soul, the Legendary Moody Scott may not genuinely qualify as a bona fide legend. And likewise, I don’t doubt that there are more glamorous singers out there somewhere than the Glamorous Bertha Payne. But that they bill themselves thus only makes their homemade records more endearing.

by Chuck Eddy

Southern rock, as properly defined in pre-3 Doors Down days, still exists on the country charts (Montgomery Gentry, Kid Rock) and occasionally even rock charts (Kid Rock again), and sometimes, people now even vastly overrate it (Drive-by Truckers, My Morning Jacket, Mudcrutch). But where it mostly survives is where it always has - local roadhouses, where working men drink too much, and perhaps throw a punch or whiskey bottle or two when the mood suits them. Listening to Lucas McCain’s New Horizon and Hank Davison Band’s Hard Way, one suspects the artists in question to be familiar with such habitats.

by Chuck Eddy

Soul and blues always come in and out of country music fashion (just ask Jimmie Rodgers and Charlie Rich or Barbara Mandrell or K.T. Oslin), and over the past few years - from Brooks & Dunn to LeAnn Rimes, Jon Nicholson to Chely Wright, Kentucky Headhunters to Rissi Palmer -- they’ve been back on the upswing. “American Radio,” the not especially soulful current hit by Nashville softies Carolina Rain, even cites “Purple Rain” and Barry White as possible inspirations. But new releases by onetime teen-country hopeful Rebecca Lynn Howard and new sister trio Carter’s Chord sound like they mean it.

by Chuck Eddy

A couple months back, I noted a strange historical truce that’s taken place between rockabilly and the sort of supper-club blues-ballad approximations that, over the years, have come to be known as “lounge music.” One artist I mentioned in passing, Little Rachel, wrote to say that she thought her music wasn’t rockabilly at all, but rather R&B. An interesting thought, though what her album - and another I’d mentioned by Britt Savage, for that matter - bear out is that it depends how you define your terms.

by Chuck Eddy

Bo Diddley, who died Monday at 79, inherited a beat that's been traced back through the '30s fieldworker blues chant "Chevrolet" to the millenium-old West African rhythm Kpanlogo, and he helped invent rock 'n' roll, funk, hard rock, disco, heavy metal, '80s pop, new country and rap music with it. (Via talk-rhymed first-person braggadocio in the latter case -- and "Say Man" has to count as one of the original dis records.)

Bo Diddley’s pre-language rock 'n' roll rhythm, the “Bo Diddley Beat,” was permanently embedded in the human consciousness in 1955 when Ellas Otha Bates (a.k.a. Ellas McDaniel, a.k.a. Bo Diddley) appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show playing it, instead of the Tennessee Ernie Ford song he had agreed to perform. The rest is indeed history as Diddley remains one of the three most important figures in the creation of rock 'n' roll and its subsequent offshoots. Like Chuck Berry's and Little Richard’s, Diddley’s influence was pervasive, and instrumental in the formation of the rock vocabulary -- legend has it that early Rolling Stones shows featured the band simply playing the "Bo Diddley Beat" for the entire night to a roomful of ecstatic kids.

by Chuck Eddy

Ross Johnson, unbeknownst to me before this year, is a Memphis underground legend (he’s worked with everyone from Jon Spencer to Peter Buck, Alex Chilton to Tav Falco) and also a musical laugh riot - at least if you think shuffling up drunken standup routines with crazed '60s soul-garage-punk and rockabilly is a smart mix, which you damn well better. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson is easily one of the best new albums I’ve heard in 2008.