Bob Dylan

The Folkies and WWII, Part Two.

A legendary singer on faith, loss, and a family legacy.

She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.

After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.

Joni Mitchell might not have wanted to be the glamorous bard of women’s rising consciousness, but with “Blue,” she became just that.

Six decades ago, leaders in the GOP backed away from the conspiracy theories peddled by the leader of the increasingly influential John Birch Society.

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

Was he or wasn't he a member of the Communist Party USA?

The polarized dialogue over Vietnam and the civil rights movement convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.

Coronavirus songwriting has gone as global as the pandemic itself, creating a new genre called pandemic pop. It’s a tradition with a long history.

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

Dark was the night, cold was the ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space.

Influence, invention, and the legacy of Leon Redbone.

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.

The four-piece lived with the New York Dolls and played with Sid Vicious, but they’ve been largely written out of cultural history.

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

A new book by Eric Lott frames white appropriation of blackness as containing the possibility of greater racial solidarity.

One of the greatest living artists in popular music still isn’t properly recognized.

Dorothy Thompson's 1941 paranoid 'parlor game' just as (un) useful today.

Mavis Staples' lyrics span from the civil-rights-era to today's societal issues.