If last night made anything clear it's that some things are still some way beyond the reach of hipster reappropriation. The audience in Hyde Park for Carole King was 99% white and middle-aged, with the very few younger people scattered about appearing to be teenagers there with their parents.

The Union Chapel is packed – upstairs and down, and the two of them emerge through a backstage curtain, step up to the mics and sing The Everly Brother’s "Wake Up Little Suzie", which should hit the spot just right, with the sweet-n-sour harmonizing of their voices, Shawn Colvin’s picking technique against Steve Earle’s rhythmic sense behind a guitar, but here and on a few songs through the set, it doesn’t quite get there.

The first reaction to Introducing Karl Blau is to wonder whether it’s an overlooked album from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. It opens with a creamy smooth voice that’s close to cracking with emotion. The song being sung is a version of country singer-songwriter Tom T Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” which sounds as though it was recorded at Alabama’s FAME studios at least 45 years ago. With gently funky guitar, shuffling drums and a slightly deeper vocal register, the next track, “Six White Horses”, bears the influence of Tony Joe White.

The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.

The name of the Savannah Music Festival might sound somewhat vague in these days of specialist events, but this is an (almost) three-week sonic orgy which treats all styles equally, blending classical beside bluegrass, jazz next to African, and country side-by-side with the blues. Multiple venues are used, some more than others. All of them are within easy walking distance, around the centre of this historically-attuned southern States city.

Absolute heartbreak has been part of country & western since before Hank Williams pined that he was so lonesome he could cry, way back in the 1940s. There’s a strand of country that’s an endless paean to the cowboy’s (and cowgirl’s) wandering soul, to messy lives lived among empty bottles and broken relationships. Texan Hayes Carll falls very much within this tradition and his fifth album, from its title onwards, is a warm bath in melancholy and broken-heartedness.

I interviewed Merle Haggard once and he’s a slippery old snake: dry, reserved and fiercely intelligent, with an ornery pride and an oft-used gift for riling people. I’m not sure we got to know him all that much better after Gandulf Hennig’s superb documentary Learning to Live with Myself, but it was a hell of a ride none the less. A man with hidden depths buried inside his hidden depths, Haggard said towards the end of the film that he had struggled his whole life to achieve his aim of being “self-contained, totally”. He wasn't about to go all therapy-speak on our asses now.

News that Richmond Fontaine were calling it a day with one final album and tour was not itself a surprise: across latter-day releases, from at least 2009’s We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, the music had become progressively incidental, an increasingly subtle backdrop to frontman Willy Vlautin’s surprisingly widescreen storyteller’s vision of small-town Americana.

The weekly magazine Country Life was founded in 1897, and is now perhaps improbably owned by Time Inc UK. Its popular image among people who do not necessarily ever look at it is defined by the famous (or infamous) girls in pearls: those portraits of well-groomed fiancées, a kind of weekly visual equivalent of – say – Desert Island Discs for prosperous young aristos, which introduce the articles of each issue. There have been 6,000 such young belles since 1897, interspersed with an occasional Prince Harry or William – not wearing pearls.

Loretta Lynn’s first album in over a decade begins not with a song, but a spoken word introduction: the Queen of Country Music, still hands-on in the studio at the age of 83, telling her collaborators about the first song she ever wrote. “I had to get all these songs wrote in two days, so I wrote 12 of them,” she says, that rich Appalachian twang still strong in her voice, before the album proper begins with a new version of that very same song.