Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Music
The late Michael Nesmith, cerebral member of The Monkees, embodied youth unrepressed.
The blind guitarist and singer from Deep Gap, North Carolina transformed American music by blending bluegrass, folk, country, blues, and gospel.
A longtime expert on Blues music recounts what it was like to work with an artist who defies definition.
Editor's Note: William Ferris is the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
The answer is complex, confusing, American.
Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor at American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.
For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
Forty-five years ago today, a scrappy-looking character with wild, kinky hair, tattered work clothes, and a round baby face that looked even younger than his 19 years, took the stage at Gerde’s Folk City, a popular bar at 11 West 4th Street, just two blocks from Washington Square, in the heart of
Was Hal Blaine one of your favorite musicians back in the 1960s? How about Larry Knechtel? Carol Kaye? Oh yes they were.
“Popular culture” is not the opposite of or the alternative to something called “high culture.” It is not degraded, debased, simple, or undisciplined. Nor is it defined primarily by its mass appeal or commercial values.
For the brilliant songwriter behind the Beach Boys, the endless summer gave way to a very hard winter. Now he is back, with a work that wants to be no less than a musical history of the American dream.
He was in the vanguard of that wave of young Britons who, in the 1960s stormed our shores and gave us back our musical heritage
I always used music. Pop songs were my escape chute from the austerity of postwar Britain, a drab and flaccid land where I wore thick long underwear and Wellington boots, where I was always saying good-bye to my parents and trying not to cry.
You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954
For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery?
It’s the fastest-growing music in America. It’s a three-billion-dollar-plus industry. Cable stations devoted to it reach sixty-two million homes. And yet, says one passionate follower of country music past and present, its story is over.
Country music is one of those phenomena that remind us how much we’ve packed into the twentieth century, for it is younger than many of our parents. This is its story.
The great Czech composer arrived on these shores a century ago and wrote some of his most enduring masterpieces here. Perhaps more important, he understood better than any American of the day where our musical destiny lay.
I did not come to America to interpret Beethoven or Wagner for the public. That is not my work and I would not waste any time on it. I came to discover what young Americans had in them and to help them express it.”
The tremendous response to his radio shows led to standing-room-only theatre performances and cross-country tours, but Rudy Vallée claimed it was just good luck and timing.
One night in February, 1928, a technician from WABC, a pioneer radio station in New York City, finished adjusting his amplifying equipment in a nightclub at 35 East Fifty-third Street and signalled his readiness to the bandleader.
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