Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann were the Brill Building era couple that made it. That’s impressive for several reasons, including the Brill Building part. By the early 1960s, rock ’n’ roll was scheduled to be dead. Ever since Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry started shaking their hips and duckwalking across…

Our divided land came together on at least one patch of common ground this week: Tina Turner was a marvelous creation. Turner died in her Switzerland home Wednesday at the age of 83, meaning she lived long enough to appreciate the esteem in which she was held within and beyond…

Football icon Jim Brown never took the popular route when it came to analyzing race relations in America, and when he died Friday at the age of 87, he left an activist legacy that defies easy assessment. His athletic legacy is easier to summarize. It requires only one sentence. He…

One of the first rules pounded into any person who expresses interest in being on the radio goes like this: Fine, but do not expect this is a way for you to just play your own favorite records. Fortunately, rules are made to be broken, and for George Tompkins, that…

I know a number of Bruce Springsteen fans who look at his Nebraska album the way a French cheesemaker might look at Velveeta. Like, “Why is this even here?” So as someone who feels the opposite and has always loved Nebraska, I was gratified this past Sunday when Springsteen told…

April Stevens wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder. If she had been, “Deep Purple” would have been enough. “Deep Purple,” which Stevens recorded as a duet with her brother Nino Tempo, reached №1 on the Billboard chart on Nov. 16, 1963. Six days later, as it was finishing up its week…

There was a Harry Belafonte it was impossible not to love. He sang “The Banana Boat Song” and a hundred other melodic tunes that enchanted millions on television screens and in Carnegie Hall. He led campaigns to feed starving children in Africa, he stood beside The Rev. Martin Luther King…

If someone offered to pay me $787,500,000 for damaging my reputation, I would take it. I still felt a twinge of frustration when Dominion Voting Systems agreed to accept $787,500,000 to settle a lawsuit in which Dominion claimed its reputation had been damaged by Fox News. It was not unlike…

On August 15, 1932, near the end of his tragically short life, country singer Jimmie Rodgers recorded “Peach Picking Time Down In Georgia,” a wonderfully jaunty tune about a young man out to pick himself a young woman. The song, which is co-credited to Rodgers and the marvelous country fiddler…