Thirty-five years ago, a young American History PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst converted his dissertation on Jack Kerouac into the book, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. Almost immediately, the biography became widely praised as […]
The passing of time has always struck me by its strange subjectivity and distortion. It’s that warped sense of years that seem like eternities as a child, but the older we get, months blend into each other and the swiftness […]
About 10 years ago, I was trapped on a train in Wyoming for fours hours in the middle of the night. I was on a cross-country trip to discover an “off-the-interstate” version of America. We were stuck on the side […]
There are a number of songs that serve as a musical roadmap in my life, and for every one of them, I can remember the exact moment when I heard the song – the exact moment that the song made […]
As a child growing up in a small town just outside New York City, I first came to conceive of America – the mythic America – through our cultural arts. I created an imaginary picture of the American plains and […]
The music world suffered some deep losses in 2012. We saw pioneering talents in nearly every genre leave this world for the great beyond: Kitty Wells, Dave Brubeck, Earl Scruggs, Etta James, Whitney Houston, MCA, Duck Dunn, Ravi Shankar and […]
In 1984, we were one of those families who didn’t have cable. We had an old wooden television — just one for the whole family — with an antenna, no remote control and a handful of basic channels. My brother […]
Somewhere 32,000 feet above West Virginia, I sat in a crammed small airplane reading notes from famed folklorist Alan Lomax’s southern journey in the late 1950s. As the plane started its gradual and bumpy descent into the New York City […]
Somewhere on a two lane state road where speed limits are a suggestion, about 150 miles from Phoenix and 300 miles from Albuquerque, “We’re Alright Now,” the leadoff track to John Hiatt’s 23rd album, Mystic Pinball, is blasting through my […]
I’ve often heard of New York City referred to as America’s largest small town. It’s that strange interconnectedness that happens to people in a city of eight million — it’s the not-so-rare moments of serendipity when you bump into a […]
