Looking for ideas on how to fill up your holiday gift list? Music is always a great choice....

Tish Hinojosa has always found graceful and thoughtful ways to integrate her experiences as a first generation Mexican American into her music. On Our Little Planet, she turns to the country side of things, offering a country sound stripped to its essence and infused with Texas, the border, and the road. Love is the main theme, a love that finds its place in gentle reflection, whether that love is lost or found or still sought for. Rosie Flores joins Hinojosa for the love as social justice tinged We Mostly Feel That Way, and Carrie Rodriguez comes along to add her voice and fiddle to a song of the wanderer, Mi Pueblo, sung in Spanish. Mountain Lullabye could fit a country station playlist, as could the title track, which mixes in polka with a hopeful lyric.

Caroline Herring draws from folk and country tradition too, and nods to poets and songwriters who’ve meant a lot ot her on her latest recording, Golden Apples of the Sun. She reinvents the rock song True Colors as almost a lullabye of affirmation, and puts her own stamp on the contemporary ballad Long Black Veil. Herring, whose thoughtful alto is one of the best voices going, is also a fine writer, a gift shown here especially on Tales of the Islander and A Little Bit of Mercy. She does WB Yeats good justice in the tile track and mixes things up with Joni Mitchell, Pablo Neruda, and Wendell Berry elsewhere on the album, which is burning its way up the folk charts at the moment.

The men of Le Vent du Nord cross borders between past and present in their latest outing, La Part du Feu. Their familiar high energy and drive and musical connection among the players and singers is there, and this time it’s in service of a number of songs drawn from the history of Quebec, many of them unearthed by recent research and personal efforts by band members. There are new songs, too, including one written with Irish singer and flute player Nuala Kennedy. It’s a recording filled with lively melodies and lyrics that make you want to know more of the stories.

Guy Clark tells stories too, his framed in the dust and heat of Texas and the southwest. On Somedays the Song Writes You, he offers a haunted guitar, a tribute to Hemingway, a wry look at trying to fix things, and, in the title cut, a song that asks more questions than it answers about change and time and living life in the midst of all that.

Emily Smith is also a storyteller, a Scottish one. Lately she and Jamie McClennan have been working on an album of Robert Burns songs, called Adoon Winding Nith, which’d make a lovely gift for the Burns fans on your list. Smith is also a fine writer herself, which she shows on the album Too Long Away. That recording opens with a graceful appreciation of a moment on a summer evening in Sunset Hymn, and closes with a consideration of settling in for winter in Winter Song. Her selection of originals and traditional songs between the two is a journey well worth the taking any time of year.

Put together a classroom of elementary age kids, an adventurous teacher, and a professional songwriter, and what do you get? A great creative time for all, and just maybe, a good song. Do that in many classrooms in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, and you get eighteen really varied songs, by turns funny, truthful, heartbreaking, and gentle. The result on record is called I Used to Know the Names of All the Stars. All this is part of Paul Reisler’s Kid Pan Alley Project, an idea which has taken hold in classrooms in many parts of the country. Not all of the collaborations lead to recordings, but this one, spearheaded by project director Terri Allard, finds many of those who worked on the Charlottesville project, nationally known artists such as Allard herself, Sissy Spacek, Jesse Winchester, and Corey Harris along with regional song writing favorites, singing songs Allard, Reisler, and other writers collaborated on with the kids. It’s a keeper, for both children and adults on your list, with songs that will lead to a lot of laughter and a lot of conversation, long after the holidays are done.

Kerry Dexter is the Music Editor for Wandering Educators.

Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, and The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road. You may reach her at music at wanderingeducators dot com.