Musicians’ memoirs fall into one of two categories. One type descends into an inferno of drug-fueled episodes of sex with a new partner every night, with very little attention to the music that consumed the artist’s life and work — […]
Musicians’ memoirs fall into one of two categories. One type descends into an inferno of drug-fueled episodes of sex with a new partner every night, with very little attention to the music that consumed the artist’s life and work — […]
Leon Russell appeared Zelig-like in almost every scene in American popular music from his earliest days of performing in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late 1950s to his performances at the 2015 Mad Dogs & Englishmen reunion engineered by […]
Musician, composer, and producer Mitch Greenhill has led a charmed life. His father, Manny, founded Folklore Productions in 1957, which led to parade of artists including Rev. Gary Davis, Peter Seeger, and Sonny Terry passing through the Greenhill house. As […]
Toward the end of James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator, Sonny’s brother, visits the jazz club where Sonny is playing. Through much of the story, the narrator struggles with his brother Sonny’s deep passion for jazz and has difficulty […]
As longtime music journalist Caryn Rose points out in the preface to her little gem of a book, Why Patti Smith Matters (Texas), the list of Smith’s contributions to art, photography, poetry, and rock and roll is so extensive that […]
Death diminishes us all, but the deaths of musicians are often especially difficult since these artists seem to have tapped into some eternal spirit that flows through them into our hearts and souls. Musicians’ deaths sadden us — sometimes because […]
Chuck Berry’s straight-ahead bluesy, rhythmic romps “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Maybellene” lie deep in the DNA of American popular music. A savvy entrepreneur, Berry cannily cashed in on the shift in musical styles from rhythm and blues […]
Many country songs evoke the persistent longing for place, for community, for belonging, but in many of those songs inclusion comes only through the exclusion of others. Although there are exceptions, country music has long excluded women, queers, and Black […]
This has been a challenging year in book publishing. Book sales continue a slow downward spiral, in part because Amazon — most publishers’ biggest customer, and their biggest competitor — has cut back on their orders and in part because […]
We can all recall where we were and what we were doing when we heard a certain song. Songs often take us back to our younger days when we had fewer cares, but some can embed themselves in our hearts […]
FRESH TRACK: Sue Foley – ‘Nothing in Rambling’Check it out
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