Some 70 years ago, a brilliant eccentric named Harry Smith compiled what he called The Anthology of American Folk Music, 84 vintage recordings that incorporated a wide range of the folk styles that fell outside the popular music mainstream in the 1920s and early 1930s — the early days of…

On December 20, 1976, Pablo Yoruba Guzman was named program director of New York radio station WBAI (99.5 FM), a nonprofit noted for its outspoken independence from corporate influence and its willingness to provide airtime for a wide range of viewpoints, often progressive and controversial. In the abstract, that sounds…

Late this summer I walked in on my granddaughter Margaret watching the show Suits on TV. Well, she was also on her phone, but she was at least half-watching the TV show, which is about the most attention anything that’s not on the phone can hope to claim these days. …

“Somewhere in the world There is a little piece of salvation And I have been dreaming of it for a long time.” — The Comedian Harmonists, “Irgendwo ou der Welt” On December 16, 1933, the popular German vocal sextet the Comedian Harmonists played Carnegie Hall. Now, some 90 years later…

It would be understandable to look at Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Beyonce, etc., and assume the music business values sales potential over gender. If that’s true to any extent now, it is far less than a hallmark of music business history — a fact underscored by an artist as triumphant…

Frank Howard spent more than 40 years in baseball, winning home run titles and a World Series. Playing in the 1960s and early 1970s, Howard might be called the Aaron Judge of his day — a big guy (6-foot-7, 255) who could hit home runs into the next zip code…

When we think about celebrities who died way before their natural time, we often focus first on the really young — Selena, Tupac Shakur, Heath Ledger, Notorious B.I.G., the “27 Club” of Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, etc. We find it a little less jarring…

Sometime around the turn of the 1970s, Hollywood realized there was a huge potential audience for movies about people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired. They were tired of looking around them and seeing the bad guys win. They were tired of the good guys having…

If you wanted to trace the last 70 years of black vocal group music, you’d have a pretty decent template in the life story and career of Rudolph Isley. Isley, who died Wednesday in his Chicago home at the age of 84, sang with his siblings Ronald and O’Kelly for…