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A Garage Sale Find of Rare Beatles Photos Took a Collector on a Magical Mystery Tour

In search of the photographer who captured the Beatles' final concert on film.
Still from Dirty Dancing.

In the Dark All Katz Are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia

Searching for where I belong, I find myself cobbling together a mongrel Judaism—half-remembered and contradictory and all mine.

The Strange Story of the Forever 1980s

Why the makers of today's popular culture are still so obsessed with the Reagan era.
Smiling man in front of a microphone

Fats Domino: Rock'n'Roll’s Quiet Rebel Who Defied US Segregation

The groundbreaking musician who inspired Elvis and The Beatles.

How Country Music Went Conservative

Country music is assumed to be the soundtrack of the Republican Party. But it wasn't always that way.

Patriotism, Partisanship, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”: A View from the Early Republic

Music continues to hold an allure for elites seeking to politicize patriotism in support of their privilege.
Title card for Burns and Novick's Vietnam War documentary.

‘The Vietnam War’: Past All Reason

The new series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is mesmerizing. But it doesn’t answer key questions about the Vietnam War.
Cover of sheet music for Miss Brown's Cake Walk, featuring a drawing of minstrel dancers in fancy attire.

Blackface Minstrelsy in Modern America

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.
Otis Redding

Five Magnificent Years

A recent Otis Redding biography examines what was and what could have been, 50 years after tragedy struck.
Illustration of Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton

The Question of Cultural Appropriation

It’s more helpful to think about exploitation and disrespect than to define cultural “ownership.”

The Long Summer of Love

Historians get hip to the lasting influences of ’60s counterculture

How a Recording-Studio Mishap Shaped '80s Music

You know that punchy percussive sound popularized by Phil Collins and Prince? This is where it came from.
Billy McComiskey (right) performing Irish music at the Library of Congress with his sons Mikey McComiskey (left) and Patrick McComiskey (center) in 2016. Library of Congress photo by Shawn Miller.

A Few Examples of Dads’ Traditions

Stephanie Hall provides examples of folklore and storytelling within a fathers' relationship to music.
Painting of "Big Mama Thornton" wearing a suit and cowboy hat, singing on stage.

The Thinning of Big Mama

"Big Mama" does what all blues greats do: she telegraphs endurance and force to whomever out there in TV land might need it. This is blues perfection.
A New Orleans parade, with confetti falling on the heads of men dancing in suits.

Sundays in the Streets

The long history of benevolence, self-help, and parades in New Orleans.
Book cover with the title "Baby Boy Born Birthplace Blues" superimposed on a photo of a man lying down with his cheek on the ground.

Baby Boy Born Birthplace Blues

"The blues was born on a riverboat between Louisville and New Albany, along those docks, in the 1890s. I mean, the blues was born nowhere, of course. Or it was born many places."

Twenty-First Century Victorians

The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance — something elites still do today.
Photograph of Redd Velvet (born Crystal Tucker) who started her career as a classically trained singer.

Keeping The Blues Alive

Is blues music a thing of the past? A festival in Memphis featuring musicians of all ages and nationalities shouts an upbeat answer.
Kids and adults free dancing.

Camille A. Brown: A Visual History of Social Dance in 25 Moves

Why do we dance? African-American social dances started as a way for enslaved Africans to keep cultural traditions alive and retain a sense of inner freedom.
Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls’ cast member A.B. Johnson plays the harmonica.

A Peek at the Golden Age of Prison Radio

"Texas Jailhouse Music" explores a time when Texas prisons promoted rehabilitation through a wildly successful radio show.

Who Tells America's Story? 'Hamilton,' Hip-Hop, and Me

How the hit musical allows those who have been left out of the story to claim the narrative of America as their own.
Gram Parsons.

Nudie and the Cosmic American

The iconic fusion of country and rock in Gram Parsons' legacy.

Will the Real Henry “Box” Brown Please Stand Up?

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.
Fats Domino's restored white piano in a museum in New Orleans.

An Object Lesson: What The Restoration of Fats Domino's Piano Means to New Orleans

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the legend’s showpiece symbolizes the city's resilience.
Cover of the U.S. Physical Fitness Program book, featuring silhouettes of people doing calisthenics.
partner

Run DNC, Run RNC

When the federal government began to claim a stake in the public’s physical fitness, and the origins of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

So You Think You Know the Banjo?

If you think that the banjo can teach us nothing about American history, Southern culture and modern race relations, then you certainly don't know the banjo.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s First Starring Film Role

The Library of Congress has the only complete version of the original 1948 release.
Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock.

The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations...to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game”: The Story of Katie Casey and Our National Pastime

The little-known story of one of the best known sing-along songs, and its connection to women's suffrage.
Willie Nelson at the 1973 Fourth of July Picnic, in Dripping Springs.

That ’70s Show

Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits brought the hippies and rednecks together in outlaw country.

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