Music

Both Jon Pardi and Jason Eady have to confront the dilemma of all young country musicians: how to navigate the pop current that keeps country music commercially viable while connecting to a past that fewer and fewer listeners are aware of.

Seeger believed songs were a way of binding people to a cause. He talks about fellow folk music icon Woody Guthrie and jumping railroad cars in an archival interview from 1985.

Todd Snider, Widespread Panic's Dave Schools and Duane Trucks perform in a new band that specializes in covering working-class songs.

On Gilchrist's The View From Here, go-go dance beats inform his piano the same way freight-train boogie-woogie does.

There was a time when people in the know in Memphis described James Govan as Otis Redding's natural successor. A new compilation collects some of his unreleased recordings.

His 18th album is a mixed-bag assortment of covers and originals brimming with undimmed eagerness.

Ken Tucker says The River & The Thread is a travelogue; a timeless work of comfort and quiet joy.

The drummer known as "Klook" was a founder of bebop — and a man endlessly open to possibilities.

A new nine-hour box set, titled Sun Country Box: 1950-1959, collects Sun Records' country output.

When Price was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, he was described as a living link from Hank Williams to the country music of today. He died Monday at the age of 87. We'll listen back to a 1999 interview he did with Terry Gross.

You could look at Rosewoman's New YorUba band as reuniting cousins who've drifted apart: jazz and folkloric Cuban music with its own family ties to the slave coast of West Africa.

Jason Isbell's Southeastern, Kanye West's Yeeezus and an assortment of remarkable women dominated the Fresh Air critic's year in listening.

Inside Llewyn Davis -- starring Oscar Isaac and a disobedient cat -- is the latest from the filmmaking duo. The brothers talk with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about their writing process ("It's mostly napping") and the cult status of their 1998 film The Big Lebowski ("How do you explain that? I have no idea."

With new songs and covers, La La Brooks' All or Nothing isn't just an attempted career comeback.

This Thanksgiving there were a lot of articles online about arming yourself with good information before arguing politics at seasonal dinners. With so much contention in the air, maybe music can help bring folks with opposing views together.

With a career derailed due to severe hand problems, Amadie found a way to play the music he loved.

The guitarist, composer and arranger died in his sleep Tuesday at 83. Hall was known for a subtle, lyrical playing style, a gift for innovation and collaborations with a host of talented musicians in a career that stretched for more than seven decades. Hear an interview from 1989.

This is it," Webb said of Fitzgerald. "I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants."

In 2012, the band became another rock group that was celebrating its 50th anniversary. This year, it released Made in California, an eight-hour, six-disc retrospective of their career that, perhaps inadvertently, shows how this once-great force in American popular music faded from public view.

In a 1999 interview, Kongar-Ol Ondar demonstrates his ancient style of singing for Terry Gross.