Reared on the extended sonic excursions of The Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, jam bands have, over the course of the genre's 15-year lifetime, added world-beat, jazz, and bluegrass flavors to t …

If you want to take a walk into the house that gospel built, you've got to get to know the architecture from the ground up. These are the bricks that set a firm foundation for all those who sing straig …

The greatest gospel cuts have always been the ones that focus on feeling, not format. That can mean Reverend Al Green putting a little hip-shaking Memphis mojo on "Be With Me Jesus." It can mean the ga …

Many people, especially academics and musicologists, have debated just exactly what constitutes folk music; leave it to a science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, to come up with the most elegant an …

Not all folk songs have words, and not all folk songs, strictly speaking, are folk songs. For instance the melody for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" was originally part of Bach's Cantata No. 147, but Le …

The human voice is the most expressive and versatile instrument known to mankind. From Gregorian chant to dramatic opera and beyond, song has played an essential part in music-making throughout the wor …

Our Basics will give you a quick fly-by of the last, oh, 12 centuries of music. Not an easy feat for 25 tracks, trying to take you from the cloistered world of eighth-century Gregorian monks to the ele …

Here's how unpredictable 2009 was on the modern-rock front: one of the year's biggest crossover cuts was by four Southern gentlemen with a knack for writing Springsteen-sized hooks (Kings of Leon's soa …

While Rancid, Incubus, and Slipknot are certainly no strangers to the modern-rock scene, their 2009 singles pushed their guitar-guided sounds further than they'd been pushed before. That goes for the s …