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Chip and Carrie: Rock Roots, Americana Sounds

Rodriguez she says the unlikely artistic partnership with Taylor is based on a genuine affection for each other.
Rodriguez she says the unlikely artistic partnership with Taylor is based on a genuine affection for each other.

You'd be hard pressed to find two people more different from each other than Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez. Taylor is a 65-year-old country music singer and songwriter with decades of experience in the music business.

Rodriguez is a 27-year-old fiddler who wasn't even born when Taylor had his first chart success. She was a backup musician for bluegrass bands when she started performing with him.

Music fans may not know Taylor's face, but they're likely to know his work: His best known song, perhaps, is "Wild Thing," a song made famous by the Troggs and later Jimi Hendrix. Getting his start in the early 1960s as a staff songwriter in music publishing's Brill Building in New York, Taylor penned a string of hits for the likes of Eddie Arnold, Bobby Bare and Waylon Jennings.

Rodriguez was performing at the South by Southwest music festival in 2001 when Taylor heard her. They have been performing together ever since and just released their third album, Red Dog Tracks. Felix Contreras talks with the pair about their unlikely collaboration and resulting successes.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Felix Contreras is co-creator and host of Alt.Latino, NPR's pioneering radio show and podcast celebrating Latin music and culture since 2010.

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