Music & Culture

Drive-By Truckers on stage at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, where It's Great To Be Alive! was recorded.

Music & Culture

Drive By-Truckers To Release Massive Live Album

11:41am July 27, 2015

by Ann Powers

The 35-track It's Great To Be Alive!, recorded over three nights last year at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, will be out October 30. Hear the album's version of "Birthday Boy" now.

Roger Waters performs at the 2015 Newport Folk Festival.

Music & Culture

Newport Folk's Pink Floyd Moment

12:00pm July 26, 2015

by Bob Boilen

Joined by My Morning Jacket and other special guests, the Pink Floyd co-founder proved himself to be one of the folk with a Friday evening set that seemed to turn rainy skies into a glorious sunset.

It's been 50 years since Bob Dylan strolled on stage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in an electric guitar, and infuriated his flock.

50 Years Ago, Bob Dylan Electrified A Decade With One Concert

11:17am July 26, 2015

by NPR Staff

It's been 50 years since Bob Dylan strolled on stage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in an electric guitar, and infuriated his flock. Historian Elijah Wald says there's much more to the story.

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To create his album Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop had to learn to love a mysterious and temperamental acoustic guitar.

Music & Culture

The Guitar In The Window: How One Instrument Steered Sir Richard Bishop's Life

11:11am July 26, 2015

by Rick Karr

Bishop's new album, Tangier Sessions, springs from a love affair with a mysterious and temperamental guitar, found in a secondhand store in Switzerland and inscribed with indecipherable writing.

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Noelle Scaggs and Michael Fitzpatrick provide the vocals for the band Fitz and the Tantrums.

A Tattooist And A Tweet Take A Band From Tiny Clubs To Tours

9:57pm July 25, 2015

by Priska Neely

Fitz and the Tantrums' members clicked instantly, and won a famous fan early. But their rise also required an enormous amount of work — what the bandleader calls "success by a thousand paper cuts."

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Music & Culture

The Night That Bob Dylan Went Electric

5:26pm July 25, 2015

Fifty years ago this weekend Bob Dylan scandalized crowds at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar. Murray Lerner, a filmmaker who shot the festival, recalls the scene.

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Willis Conover, The Voice Of Jazz Behind The Iron Curtain

10:55am July 25, 2015

by Scott Simon

American broadcaster Willis Conover was known around the world in places like Prague, Moscow and Warsaw, but not so much at home. For more than 40 years, he hosted a jazz show on the Voice of America.

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Music & Culture

Size Matters: The Vocabularies Of Pop Musicians

10:55am July 25, 2015

by Andrew Limbong

A new study looks at the lyrics of the 93 bestselling music artists in recording history. Turns out rappers tend to have a wider vocabulary than others. Famous wordsmith Bob Dylan came in fifth.

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A rehearsal for the first fully staged U.S. production of Ethel Smyth's 1904 opera The Wreckers at the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Music & Culture

One Feisty Victorian Woman's Opera Revived

3:30pm July 24, 2015

by Tom Huizenga

A skilled mountain climber who knew Tchaikovsky and Brahms, Ethel Smyth was a big personality whose politically charged opera The Wreckers gets its first fully staged production in the U.S.

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#NPRreads: Electric Dylan, Fracking And The Iran Deal Deconstructed

1:30pm July 24, 2015

by Sarah Handel

Also this week, the world's most famous DJ you've probably never heard.