Folk & Bluegrass

Wainwright has just released an elaborate box-set career retrospective called 40 Odd Years -- and the pun in the title is definitely intended. Rock critic Ken Tucker says it presents the singer-songwriter just the way his music does, artful warts and all.

Welch and Rawlings perform an in-studio concert featuring several songs from The Harrow and the Harvest, and talk about many of the lyrics they've written over the years.

Bridges won an Oscar in 2009 for his performance as a broken-down country singer in the film Crazy Heart, for which her performed his own vocals. He also sings as himself on a new self-titled album.

Deer Tick has just released its fourth album, Divine Providence. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the album takes the Rhode Island band in a more raw-sounding direction.

Rowan got his start performing with the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe. In the '70s, he formed the band Old and in the Way with Jerry Garcia. Now, he joins his group for an in-studio session and interview on Fresh Air.

Now in his late 70s, the singer-songwriter has just released a new album, his first collection of new material in eight years, titled Old Ideas. Rock critic Ken Tucker says these Cohen songs work as both pop music and as prayers.

Bahamas is the stage name used by Canadian singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen, who put out his first album in 2009. His second album, Barchords, is a measured look at the end of a lengthy relationship.

Over the past four decades, the singer has chronicled his relationships with his ex-wife, the late Kate McGarrigle, and his children, the singers Rufus and Martha Wainwright. His new album, Older Than My Old Man Now, addresses his relationship with yet another family member: his father.

Snider is a singer-songwriter with a sharp sense of humor, as evidenced by the title of his new album, Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables. Rock critic Ken Tucker says that even Snider's most pessimistic songs have a sense of humor and energy that gives them an exhilarating spin.

Doc Watson, who was called "a living national treasure" for his virtuoso flat-picking and his repertoire of traditional folk and bluegrass tunes, has died. He was 89. Fresh Air remembers the blind guitar and banjo player with excerpts from a 1988 interview.

Young's latest album with Crazy Horse, Americana, features songs many of us learned as children, like "Oh Susannah" and "Clementine."

The legendary folksinger wrote hundreds of political songs, children's tunes an ballads, including "This Land Is Your Land," "Pastures of Plenty" and "Pretty Boy Floyd." Many of his tracks appear on a new CD box set released by Smithsonian Folkways.

Critic Ken Tucker says that some songs on Tempest should less like concentrated efforts than outpourings of rambling thoughts; others are as precisely crafted as any Bob Dylan has written.

In Who Could That Be at This Hour?, a prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler satirizes pulp mysteries and uncovers the parallels between detective fiction and childhood. In both, he says, an outsider is trying to make his way in a mysteriously corrupt world.

From the inescapable "Call Me Maybe" to Fiona Apple's intricate word puzzles to the strikingly gorgeous return of Iris DeMent, the Fresh Air critic counts down hiss favorite albums and musical moments of the year.

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.

The singer-songwriter often writes songs about his complex relationships with women. On his new Electric, Thompson is still coming to terms with the sources of his frustrations which out to give him material for many years to come.

Cash spent half a century in the limelight as a country singer turned American icon. Between 1958, when he first recorded for Columbia, until 1986, when it didn't renew his contract, he recorded more than 50 singles and 60 albums for the label.

The singer-songwriter has said, as he was writing his new album Still Fighting the War, that "a theme of perseverance through hard times revealed itself." Rock critic Ken Tucker says the record is no downer and that Cleaves finds complex sentiments and wittily phrased ideas in many of his new songs.