Before there was Bob Dylan, the folk revival icon, there was Odetta. Before there was Janis Joplin, the wailing blues singer, there was Odetta. The woman whom Martin Luther King Jr. called the “Queen ...

The enduring myth is that the Beatles and their UK brethren were a much-needed shot in the arm for an otherwise moribund American pop music scene of the early 1960s. The story goes that “the ...

Folk ballads will likely never disappear, considering our dedication to preserving them and, if the 1960s are any indication, reviving them from history. A ton of rock musicians took old folk ballads ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The story of America can be told through the lyrics of folk music – songs of the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and the ...

Long before Rednex turned “Cotton Eye Joe” into a Eurodance hit, versions of the American folk song had been circulating for generations, and by the 1880s it had even developed into its own dance.

OAKLAND, Calif. — I’m remembering a quote from television producer David Simon (The Wire) who when producing his at-the-time new show on post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme, argued for music — not movies ...

Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory.

Long before the Revolutionary War, numerous traditions of Indigenous music flourished in places later incorporated into the United States. European music was heard in the New World from the earliest ...

ANN ARBOR, MI - The Grammy-nominated American Patchwork Quartet plans to reveal the global influences woven into American folk music when it performs at The Ark Sunday, Aug. 16. Tickets cost $29 to ...