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Billie Holiday performs on stage.

A Brief History of the Policing of Black Music

Harmony Holiday dreams of a Black sound unfettered by white desire.

Rewriting Country Music's Racist History

Artists like Yola and Rhiannon Giddens are blowing up what Giddens calls a “manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”
Cartoon by Joey Perr; a man in a top hat and holding a monacle studies a sign broadcasting Ella Fitzgerald as music notes fill the air.

What’s Going On

The vexed history of "Night Life" in the New Yorker.
Sasha Geffen next to their book

Pop Music Has Always Been Queer

Sasha Geffen’s debut book reveals that the history of pop music is a history of gender rebellion.
Man with a guitar and woman behind the counter of a record store in Vigo County, Indiana.
Exhibit

The Music Biz

American music is big business. The exhibit explores the industry's history, from the songwriters to the technological innovators to the execs who have decided who profits, and who doesn't.

Heavy Metal, Year One: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath's Groundbreaking Debut

A look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement, half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?”
Picture of DeFord Bailey holding a harmonica amplified by a gourd.

The Unsung Black Musician Who Changed Country Music

From the moment DeFord Bailey stepped onto a stage in Nashville, country music would never be the same. Decades after his death he finally got his due.

Dr. Dre: The Chronic

Revisiting the timeless 1992 debut from Dr. Dre, a historic moment in hip-hop that redefined West Coast rap.
Photo of a large crowd at the Altamont Festival, 1969.

What Happened to Rock and Roll After Altamont?

On the Grateful Dead's “New Speedway Boogie,” and the true end of the Sixties.

The Commercial Rise of Country Music During the Great Depression

The Depression was the gravitational pull that created country stars and their nationwide universe of listeners.

Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair

In the mid-1990s, Sarah McLachlan set out to prove a woman's place was center stage.

A Lifetime Of Labor: Maybelle Carter At Work

Maybelle Carter witnessed the dawn of the recording era and helped create country music as one of the genre's biggest acts.
Maybelle and Helen Carter.

For Women Musicians, Maybelle Carter Set the Standard and Broke the Mold

One of the most indispensable guitarists of all time, Carter was a quiet revolutionary.
Steve Dahl beside the dumpster full of records collected for Disco Demolition Night

Disco Demolition: The Night They Tried to Crush Black Music

When a DJ called on listeners to destroy disco records in a Chicago stadium, things turned nasty.
Sparkle Moore performing with guitar

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years.
Solange and Beyonce Knowles at the MTV Video Music Awards, 2007.

‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop.
Still from a video game animation of a Black cowboy aiming a pistol at another.

‘Old Town Road’ and the History of Black Cowboys in America

A songwriter-historian weighs in on the controversy over Lil Nas X’s country-trap hit.

The Drummer Hal Blaine Provided the Beat for American Music

Blaine was never as recognizable as Elvis or Sinatra. Still, he was key to the creation of some of rock n' roll's biggest hits.

How Smooth Jazz Took Over the '90s

And why you should give smooth jazz a chance.

David Porter Takes Us to School

The man who wrote "Soul Man" gives a master class on how code-switching through music helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

Here Is a Human Being

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.

How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.
Colorful illustration of Larry Norman, haloed by yellow.

The Unlikely Endurance of Christian Rock

The genre has been disdained by the church and mocked by secular culture. That just reassured practitioners that they were rebels on a righteous path.
Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin Was the Defining Voice of the 20th Century

No one else sang as well as her, and no other singer changed popular music as much as her.

The Forgotten Story of Pure Hell, America’s First Black Punk Band

The four-piece lived with the New York Dolls and played with Sid Vicious, but they’ve been largely written out of cultural history.
Woman playing a guitar, and the cover of the book 'Country Music USA.'

‘Country Music … Was Anything BUT Pure’

On the music’s African-American tributaries, its unpredictable politics, country radio’s woman problem, and working on Ken Burns’ forthcoming doc.

Going to Graceland

The makers of the documentary “The King” turn to Elvis Presley to understand something about the state of the country.

The Counterfeit Queen of Soul

A strange and bittersweet ballad of kidnapping, stolen identity and unlikely stardom.
Leon Bridges singing on stage.

'They Put Us in a Little Box': How Racial Tensions Shape Modern Soul Music

While white Americana singers have infused more soul into their sound, black artists still feel restricted by limited expectations.

Acquitting Elvis of Cultural Appropriation

His groundbreaking rock-n-roll was neither 'thievery' nor 'derivative blackness.'

How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement

Looking back at the golden era of rap writing.

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