Tag: american music

Generations of musicians got their start busking the streets of the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. After a decade of ‘hobo-ing’ around cities like New Orleans, Paris, and New York, Charley Crockett discovered it was his turn.

In 1973, Columbia Records professionally recorded the infamous band for a planned concert record. Columbia never released it. Maybe they never recorded it.

The saxophone colossus recorded two concerts at the same venue fifty years apart. Only one recording emerged from the vault.

Sometimes this is how musical history gets saved.

Privately made records enjoy a cult following among collectors, but few are as legendary as Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 LP Dreamin’ Wild.

Some fans prefer small club shows, others like arena rock shows, but do we care what the bands prefer?

Link Wray is best known for his rock instrumentals, but in the early 1970s, he and his brothers recorded three albums in a chicken shack that sound like nothing else in his massive oeuvre.

Journalist John O’Connor talks about writing his epic Oxford American magazine feature on musician Link Wray.

In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.

An oral history of the night Nirvana recorded “Unplugged,” their most tender, original live performance.

With approximately 75 percent of golden age gospel music lost, the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project is trying to save what’s left.

The story of the Velvet Underground’s fourth album that almost never was.

Just as we were in the 1930s and ’60s, America is suffering a moral crisis. We have to decide which side we are on: hate and exclusion, or justice, inclusion, and democracy?

How did cowboy hats and boots become the visual iconography of American rural music?

How soul singer Mary Jane Jones was forced to perform as Aretha Franklin before she took control of her life and career.