The best music photographs, especially the photos of live performances, whether in small clubs or arena stages, re-create the passion of the artist’s performance. The photos take us there, give us front row seats, capture the lines of agony […]
The best music memoirs simply unfold the moments of an artist’s life, without fanfare and without a desire to get even with former bandmates or friends. The best memoirs reveal to us — and revel in — what the Romantic […]
Over Labor Day weekend in 1941, photographer Edward Weston and his wife, Charis, the sister of Highlander Folk School’s librarian, Leon Wilson, stopped at the school for a visit. Weston was traveling across the country taking photographs to accompany a […]
Brandi Carlile knows how to captivate; she invites us into her songs with her ability to evoke feelings of isolation and loss, forgiveness and hope, love and joy. Carlile entrances us with her stories of people just like us, facing […]
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please” We all know these lines […]
A few years ago, musician Marty Jourard, a Gainesville, Florida, native, made the case in Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town (ND review) that Gainesville was the crossroads of rock and roll. In the mid- […]
Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, Volume II (Bluebird Press) has been a long time coming, and it’s well worth the wait. Continuing along the lines of the first volume, published in 1984, Ann Allen Savoy’s breathtaking sketches of […]
On April 9, Merry Clayton will release a new album titled Beautiful Scars. It’s her first studio album since 1994’s Miracles, but more importantly the new album allows her to testify about her gratitude for her miraculous recovery from a […]
One of the most riveting scenes in American literature is the threshing floor episode in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. The young protagonist, John Grimes, writhes on the floor of his father’s church, surrounded by the […]
Bassist Victor L. Wooten, a founding member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, has a dire message in his allegorical tale The Spirit of Music: The Lesson Continues (Vintage). Since he wrote the book before the pandemic, his message sounds […]
