This Saturday is Record Store Day, a national holiday of sorts for music-lovers that is now entering its third year of celebrating the wealth and variety of music and musical communities centered around local, independent record shops. Here's how the organizers describe this special Saturday in April:
This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States and in various countries across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, djs spinning records and on and on. Metallica officially kicked off Record Store Day at Rasputin Music in San Francisco on April 19, 2008 and Record Store Day is now celebrated the third Saturday every April.
We're also getting in on the festivities here at the The Art of the Rural--and if you're living too far from a participating store, sit back and relax this week to our "Rural Record Store Day Playlist." The artists included below have all been discussed on the site, and though there were some artists that we could not upload using the Lala service, we think it's still a fitting retrospective on the first few months of our project here. Happy listening!
