After a live reunion in 1983, the Everly Brothers recorded three studio albums that showed they could transcend nostalgia. On EB 84, producer Dave Edmunds crafted a rock/country sound that suited the Everlys’ talents, from the Rockpile-flavored “I’m Taking My Time” to the melodic pop of “On The Wings Of A Nightingale”, penned by Paul [...]

Because brothers, lawyers, and egos were involved, we’ll never really know what actually happened to Creedence Clearwater Revival. What they did during their spectacular five-year run was pretty simple: They topped the charts while writing and recording archetypal American rock that retains every little bit of vigor all these years after. These 25 tracks represent [...]

As the members of Fleetwood Mac will tell you, behind every great album there’s usually a great back story, but Born To Run appears to have been the exception. From the beginning, its creation lacked a certain essential melodrama. Bruce Springsteen, then two records into a promising career as the early ’70s’ latest New Dylan, [...]

Few formats are as unforgiving as a singer accompanying themselves on an acoustic guitar. This can be especially true of moonlighting electric players, and Snooks Eaglin is one flashy electrician, with fast fingers, a taste for distortion, and a name-that-tune repertoire that is said to top 2,500 songs. In 1959, Eaglin was already a familiar [...]

My Goodness, Yes! collects twenty of the best singles released on the Nashville-based Silver Fox label. It’s a great portrait of late soul music, and suggests that soul — commonly regarded as the product of specific cities and studios — had by the late 1960s become a free-floating pop style, an amalgam of the approaches [...]

Shelby S. Singleton was Nashville’s ultimate fat cat, remembered by keyboardist Jim Dickinson as a “redneck” with a “long, greasy ducktail and mirror sunglasses,” passing out cigarettes with his name embossed in gold. Perhaps Singleton’s most famous move was purchasing the legendary Sun catalogue in 1969, then reissuing it on 28-minute fake-stereo platters with “Lifetime [...]

“Funky Drummer”, a minor hit for James Brown in 1970 — with Clyde Stubblefield in the title role — features the propulsive percussion break that is said, with less exaggeration than you might think, to have “launched a thousand raps.” Stubblefield’s ubiquitously sampled groove grounds the rhythm on such indelible tracks as NWA’s “Fuck Tha [...]

North of the Rio Grande it is called conjunto; south of the river it is referred to as Norteño. On the Texas-Mexico border, it’s just plain musica, and when it’s performed by Los Pinguinos Del Norte, a trio that’s been playing for more than 54 years, it is simply some of the most soulful music [...]

The Atomic Cafe, an acclaimed 1982 cinema verite documentary (and its soundtrack LP), brilliantly presented America’s official atomic preparedness propaganda of the 1940s and 1950s, laughably dated and discredited by the ’80s. Though it debuted during the Reagan years, most negative commentary came from witless pacifists unable to grasp the film’s ironic humor, who whined [...]