Part 1 of a 5-part series: This is a truncated, subjective survey, with whole pieces missing, abetted by my memory of the times and gap-filling information gleaned from the internet. In short, it’s a collector’s narrative, all that was found and then lost, or what made it through the maelstrom…

The implication of the word “hippie” was originally, like many slang terms, derogatory. In the Jazz confines of some place like New York City it was applied to wanna-bes, those neophytes who tried a little too hard to make the scene. …

The Blues, rather than some ink-inscribed parchment, might be the solid foundation that the U.S. of A. rests upon, depends upon, falls back upon; starting with the premise (the presumption, if you will) that all recorded and popular musical styles in the Americas (as a whole) derive from The Blues…

The GIF that you see above was made using a Hadda Brooks Trio 78rpm from Modern Music, a Los Angeles based label known for releasing R&B in the mid-1940s and 1950s. The label distributed recordings by such luminaries as Etta James and John Lee Hooker. Putting aside the lustrous recording…

Pop music doesn’t only come out of a speaker. It’s also an image. It might even be a TV show, the camera trained on the stage, occasionally swivelling to the audience. An audience dressed for the occasion. One of the longest running TV shows in history, weathering the shifts in…

The casual observer, the type who may indeed be unable (or unwilling) to identify the product, to put a name to the face, is yet prey to the side-effects of any particular pop-icon’s off-track ramblings. When the pop star inserts him/herself into the wider spheres of opinion, or feels obliged…

Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot by Vivien Goldman (University of Texas Press 2019) This necessary book, which may have “feminist” in the subtitle, should otherwise be ranked alongside any tome that runs down musical history, filling in the blanks, rectifying the…

Marvin Gaye was an integral, one might say crucial, member of the Motown team, a brand that certainly lent itself to the cover version; even within its stable, one song might be tried out multiple times by ensemble or solo Motown artists as well as whoever, outside of Motown, could…

When we talk about the Top Ten, that dubious arbiter of “quality,” as if piles of cash equate with inherent value, let’s all remember that that marketplace marker only represents a fraction of the actual musical output of any given year. But given the “sales record” of certain songs, and…