Tammy Wynette sang some of the saddest songs in country music: “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Apartment No. 9,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House.” Wynette’s vocals waver on the edge of breaking as they wring deep emotions from listeners. When Wynette modulates her vocal […]
Describing Chicago, Saul Bellow once wrote, “Provinciality is not altogether a curse, we gain from our backwardness.” Chicago wears the mantle of the Second City, taking a back seat to New York in almost every category including theater, cuisine, and […]
Musicians’ memoirs fall into one of two categories. One type descends into an inferno of drug-fueled episodes of sex with a new partner every night, with very little attention to the music that consumed the artist’s life and work — […]
Leon Russell appeared Zelig-like in almost every scene in American popular music from his earliest days of performing in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late 1950s to his performances at the 2015 Mad Dogs & Englishmen reunion engineered by […]
Musician, composer, and producer Mitch Greenhill has led a charmed life. His father, Manny, founded Folklore Productions in 1957, which led to parade of artists including Rev. Gary Davis, Peter Seeger, and Sonny Terry passing through the Greenhill house. As […]
Toward the end of James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator, Sonny’s brother, visits the jazz club where Sonny is playing. Through much of the story, the narrator struggles with his brother Sonny’s deep passion for jazz and has difficulty […]
As longtime music journalist Caryn Rose points out in the preface to her little gem of a book, Why Patti Smith Matters (Texas), the list of Smith’s contributions to art, photography, poetry, and rock and roll is so extensive that […]
Death diminishes us all, but the deaths of musicians are often especially difficult since these artists seem to have tapped into some eternal spirit that flows through them into our hearts and souls. Musicians’ deaths sadden us — sometimes because […]
Chuck Berry’s straight-ahead bluesy, rhythmic romps “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Maybellene” lie deep in the DNA of American popular music. A savvy entrepreneur, Berry cannily cashed in on the shift in musical styles from rhythm and blues […]
Many country songs evoke the persistent longing for place, for community, for belonging, but in many of those songs inclusion comes only through the exclusion of others. Although there are exceptions, country music has long excluded women, queers, and Black […]
