Ed Ward

In the early 1960s, Joe Barry combined Cajun and country music into a whole new sound. In honor of a new anthology of Barry's music titled A Fool to Care, critic Ed Ward tells the forgotten musician's story.

One of the great fantasies of the hippie era was that new combinations of music would emerge from the experimentation that was going on. Still, very few lived it. Ed Ward says The Insect Trust was one of the exceptions.

There are lots of stories about the band that got away. For rock historian Ed Ward, one of those groups has always been Autosalvage, a New York quartet who made one album and then stopped playing.

Charles was one of those rock 'n' roll figures whose work you're almost certainly familiar with, even if you've probably heard of him. He lived in isolation, recorded very little, didn't perform live and died in 2010. Rock historian Ed Ward looks at his memorable body of work.

It's hard to believe today, but in the mid-1950s, Los Angeles didn't mean much in terms of popular music. But the coming of rock 'n' roll meant an infusion of tiny record labels -- and one was Dore, run by a happy-go-lucky guy named Lew Bedell. Ed Ward tells its short, crazy story here.

Before the Civil Rights movement, segregated American cities helped give birth to the Chitlin' Circuit, a touring revue that provided employment for hundreds of black musicians. Rock historian Ed Ward profiles two recent books which illuminate the conditions these musicians endured.

In the 1960s, it was hard to form a rock band, especially in New York. With connections, though, you could make it — and that's how one of the most mysterious and legendary New York bands, The Left Banke, came to be.

Boogie-woogie was a piano style that began in the early 20th century and later became a huge fad. Rock historian Ed Ward explains how the genre re-emerged as an important precursor to rock 'n' roll.

Stone is known to millions from the records he made with Sly and the Family Stone. But his early days, and the recordings he produced for his own Stone Flower label, add another dimension to the career of this enigmatic character, rock historian Ed Ward said.

New Orleans went decades without a homegrown label to document its riches. Rock critic Ed Ward says this explains why many 1950s New Orleans classics were released by Ace Records in Jackson, Miss.