TULSA — The Bob Dylan Center, which opened here last week, reminds us how deeply we should appreciate the best American songwriter of the last 60 years. It also reminds us that if we ever start assuming we really know the guy behind all that songwriting, well, we’ll always be…

A lamentably departed colleague of mine from the New York Daily News, Bill Bell, had a banjo joke. This guy owns a banjo and he’s sick of it. He doesn’t want it any more. He just wants to get rid of it. He tries to give it to schools, to…

Two pieces of terrible news just reminded me how I used to really like professional hockey. Guy Lafleur, who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s and into the 1980s, died Friday, one week after the death of Mike Bossy, who played a couple of years later for the…

I’d love to see Dion DiMucci’s story on Broadway. It’s a good story. It’s as good as his music. Growing up as maybe the only kid in the Bronx who wanted to be Hank Williams; bursting into early rock ’n’ roll stardom with the Belmonts through a combination of good…

Anyone who cares about early rock ’n’ roll will and should remember Art Rupe as the music man who gave us Little Richard. What needs equal or more remembering about Art Rupe, who died Friday at the age of 104, is that he also gave us a small army of…

Dave Roberts will earn $6.5 million this year to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers, a job he has held for seven years with considerable success. He has, for instance, won a World Series. Actually, Roberts has won two World Series if you count his stolen base when he was playing…

The lazy history of early rock ’n’ roll suggests that Elvis and Chuck and Jerry Lee and Little Richard came along and obliterated the sleepy pop music that ruled the radio before they barged through the door. There’s a certain romantic appeal to that image. The only problem is that…

For a variety of reasons, all of them in retrospect excellent, various friends and I used to drive around and across the country. Gas was cheaper and cars had more personality a half century ago. But that wasn’t why we did it. We were looking to find old records, see…

Earlier this month the New York Times carried an extensive obituary on Autherine Lucy Foster, who died at 92 and who in 1956 had been the first black student to enroll at the University of Alabama. Her matriculation went about as well as could be expected in a state where…