Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Jan. 13, 1968 (Dan Poush photograph.)
WEST BRANCH, Ia.—This road of incongruity was too much to pass up.
I’ve driven past the sign on I-80 for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum at least a dozen times on my way to Iowa City, the Iowa State Fair, or a minor league baseball game. I never stopped to see the museum. After all, in a 2021 CSPAN survey, presidential historians ranked the 44 presidents. Hoover came in 36th due to his legacy of economic woes. Months after his 1929 election the stock market crashed and the United States fell into the Great [...]
A good song can take you places. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown appeared with his compadre guitarist Bo Ramsey in March 2009 at the Harris Theater at Millennium Park in Chicago. Brown is in the upper tier of Americana singer-songwriters along with John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Pat McLaughlin, and Dan Penn. Brown makes every word count and his phrasing dips into rural blues like a baptism.
The Chicago show was a benefit for the PACTT (Parents Allied with Children and Teachers for Tomorrow) Learning Center, which assists children and young adults with severe autism. Many autistic kids connect with music and some PACTT clients [...]
In the darkest of musical Januarys comes word that Beatle Bob has stopped dancing.
Bob Matonis is the St. Louis-based fan that looks like an Ed Sullivan-era Beatle replete in black suits and black bangs.
Known as “Beatle Bob,” he has spent decades dancing a mosh-up of the Twist and the Frug in the front rows of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, South by Southwest in Austin, Tx. FitzGerald’s in Berwyn and hundreds of other music clubs.
Beatle Bob has claimed to have seen 9,439 days of concerts in a row.
That number was in an e-mail he sent out Sunday night announcing that his streak was coming to an end on Jan. 23, 2023. It [...]
Ironing Sam’s keyboard at NMAAM. I was so happy to see this.
NASHVILLE, TN.–For an edifice fixed in time, a museum can move in many ways. There are moments of discovery and minutes of connection. A museum can be a unifier.
Over Christmas, my brother and I visited the two-year-old National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in downtown Nashville. The magnificent 56,000-square-foot museum is a block away from the historic Ryman Auditorium. There are more than 1,500 artifacts, objects, and photos and many of them have Chicago connections: Chess Records, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, The [...]
