Tag: Music

New Faces of Tradition

New Faces of Tradition

Zoe van Buren and Katy Clune

Stories and portraits from the Millennial Traditional Artists project, a collaboration between the North Carolina Arts Council and Duke University.

Forty Sundays a Year

Forty Sundays a Year

Pableaux Johnson
Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.

Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.

Tyler DeWayne Moore
Jazz and the Magic City

Jazz and the Magic City

Burgin Matthews

This is the story of jazz in Birmingham, and of Birmingham in jazz—of how Alabama's "Magic City" helped create some of the nation's most swinging and celestial sounds, and of how that city, in the process, came to create itself.

New Orleans Second Line Parades

New Orleans Second Line Parades

Pableaux Johnson
Going Up and Coming Down

Going Up and Coming Down

Alex Macaulay, with illustrations by Phil Blank

Macaulay's essay traces the highs and lows of country singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson’s early music career when he emerged as the standard bearer for a supposedly new and authentic Nashville sound. Focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s, it examines the critical, commercial, and personal impact of such expectations at a time when Americans from varied walks of life latched on to country music and its performers as founts of honesty and authenticity that sustained often competing images of the South and the nation.

W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues

W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues

Adam Gussow, with paintings by Lamar Sorrento
Beyond Latin Night

Beyond Latin Night

Samuel K. Byrd
“What Music Does”

“What Music Does”

Si Kahn
Down in the Hole

Down in the Hole

Max Fraser, with illustrations by Carmen J. Price
Soliloquy of Chaos

Soliloquy of Chaos

William Pym
“Sing It So Loudly”

“Sing It So Loudly”

Julia Cox

Reflecting on her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, folk icon Joan Baez was underwhelmed by the resurgence of protest music. “There needs to be more. It’s terribly important, because that’s what keeps the spirit,” she told Rolling Stone. “Carping and shouting, as much as it gets stuff off your chest in front of 100,000, you really need something uplifting . . . The problem right now is we have no anthem.” Baez’s definition of useful music—something uplifting, preferably an anthem—summarizes her own canon of protest music and history with activist movements.