If you stepped onto the sidewalk of any decent-sized American city and randomly tossed a pebble, odds are at least 50–50 that you would hit someone who used to be a member of the Drifters. A rhythm and blues vocal group that began in 1953 and established a remarkable legacy…

Cindy Williams spent the last half of her life being known as Shirley Feeney from Laverne & Shirley. She was, she said, fine with that. “I love my life,” she said in 2013. “I wouldn’t trade it for anyone’s.” Williams died Sunday at the age of 75, after what was…

When music fans and historians talk about the great songwriters of Motown in the 1960s, they will usually reel off Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield and Smokey Robinson and then take a break — not because there were no others, but because that group casts such a long shadow over everyone else. …

When long-time hosts say goodbye, understandably enough, they want listeners to appreciate the good times that were, not lament the silence to come. They accentuate the positive. Bob Sherman, who for the last 54 years on New York radio has hosted the weekly folk music program “Woody’s Children,” evoked decades…

Almost all of us become enchanted at some point with something in popular culture. Maybe it’s Taylor Swift, or the Beatles, or Black Panther, or Fortnite, or the Kardashians. Or whatever. We want to know everything we can about this thing. And then usually, after a while, we downshift. We…

If America had known in the 1980s that 40 years later hip-hop would be the subject of a multi-part historical documentary on PBS, maybe America wouldn’t have been so scared. Fight The Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World, a production of PBS and BBC, premieres Jan. 31 at 9 p.m…

The rich and underappreciated art of American tap dancing lost an intriguing and invaluable pioneer earlier this month with the death of Arthur Duncan. Duncan, who was 97, tapped in one of the unlikeliest places, the Lawrence Welk television show, during years when too many traditional floorboards had gone silent. …

David Crosby died Wednesday at the age of 81, which isn’t bad when you spent the second half of your life playing with house money. In the 1980s, when he did five months in a Texas prison and seemed to get arrested every other week for guns or drugs, not…

Sometime around 1951, country and gospel singer Martha Carson wrote a song titled “Satisfied.” Faster paced than a lot of church songs, with a propulsive rhythm that foreshadowed rock ’n’ roll, it caught on fast and was recorded by more than a hundred artists, including the Blackwood Brothers. The Blackwood…