NPR

In rural America in the early part of last century, women who did full-time labor to keep households and farms running while raising children were considered unemployed unless they earned a wage. Country music pioneer Mother Maybelle Carter often did double duty, laboring at home by day, raising children, and playing shows at night for years.

A self-taught, prolific, intuitive, musician, he embodied and embraced the totality of Black musical history, blew speakers and mystified listeners, and his unconvential approach to making shit bumping made him what some call “the closest Los Angeles has come to producing a Sun Ra.”

Many obstacles exist for people on parole who want medication-assisted opioid treatment. One obstacle is how much they trust their parole officer. It can cost people their lives.

“We have forgotten that black gospel music was fashioned by the courageous inventiveness of black migrants from Southern states to places like Chicago and Detroit. The style they created had within it a political and economic critique of racial capitalism: One need only peruse the lyrical content about joblessness, motherlessness, despair, to see it. But we forget that this lyrical content, like what Zora Neale Hurston said about the Sanctified Church, was also sounded out in a register that marked its difference from established Christian denominations. In this way, black gospel was not fundamentally about utopian otherworldliness and the sweet by-and-by, even when the lyrics were.”

Silvio Gesell had a groundbreaking idea: money that expires. Shockingly, people with lots of money were not big fans.

“If Maybelle Carter — mother of country music, without whom country and rock and roll guitar would not exist — can’t make the great guitar player list, how can women musicians expect to be seen at all?”

Drug companies are working hard to influence state Medicaid drug cost controls to keep their profits flowing.

“But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect.”

On the 47th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, NPR has this excerpt of 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings, former Chicago Tribune reporter Philip Caputo’s 2005 book about covering the massacre, in which members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed unarmed students who were protesting the Vietnam War.

Some people go to great lengths for fame and fortune, especially this Florida surfer who plays guitar.