Immersed in America: The Creation of Elvis Presley
We know how Elvis Presley’s story reflects on American history, its music and mythology, but how did America help to create Elvis?
We know how Elvis Presley’s story reflects on American history, its music and mythology, but how did America help to create Elvis?
First-born Holy Rollers of American Pentecostalism include rebels Sister Rosetta Tharpe, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Ray Charles.
While their motives were more mercenary than musical, American small record label impresarios could hear the barriers falling between the races right before their ears.
Are Bob Dylan’s improved vocals in his later years a deliberate aesthetic choice? Has he re-focused his attention on the art of singing?
As Bob Dylan learned, only through baring of one’s soul does one show the way forward, providing both a glimpse into the other and perhaps the shape of things to come.
Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding is more about what it is not than what it is. Does that hold true for the mythology of John Wesley Hardin himself?
A show with this many moving pieces could easily have devolved into chaos, but in Jon Batiste’s hands, it was a wonderfully diverse, talented vision of what America can be at its best.
While Iris DeMent may moan against the world’s evils in Workin’ on a World, the album offers an optimistic message. We can change the world!
Good As I Been To You was warmly received by critics, but a Bob Dylan album of covers with a stripped-down, rough-edged acoustic aesthetic did not satisfy fans’ hunger for new Dylan material.
The best progressive rock albums are profoundly ambitious and forward-thinking, music that’s immense, expansive, and mind-blowing, with dramatic elements.
In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan conveys his thoughts in his signature styles, as in his lyrics, he can be plainspoken, gnomic, and over the top.
Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song is an awful book, awash with misogyny and crusty old man rants like a drunken, MAGA hat-wearing uncle.