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‘Elvis kept following me!’ Country singer Mimi Roman
She went from rodeo queen to right-hand girl of the King – but a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan made her shy from the spotlight. Now she’s finally ready to take her bow ‘Oh good, they didn’t send me the photograph of me and Elvis to sign.” Mimi Roman is opening mail in the…
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‘He has this brilliant ability to inspire’: John Otway
Fans of ‘Rock and Roll’s Biggest Failure’ have taken him from Top of the Pops to Cannes, and keep him touring constantly in his 70s. We head to a fan convention to find out why It’s Sunday evening at the All’s Well bar in Gibraltar and the jukebox is playing non-stop John Otway songs. The…
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‘Wild Thing still gives me the chills!’ Chip Taylor
Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin and dozens more sang his songs, which spanned country, rock, R&B and beyond. Now 83 and having treatment for cancer, Taylor explains why he’s still reaching for his guitar hip Taylor is best known for a song of restless raunchiness – the three-chord groin-thrust of the Troggs’ Wild Thing…
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‘Our government sees it as cute but unimportant’
Post-revolutionary France tried to stamp it out, but working class communities kept speaking it. Now Occitan powers a vivacious and political European music scene Gianluca Tramontana It’s May Day in Marseille, and beyond the celebrations – and the ongoing protests against President Macron raising the retirement age – another smaller but just as potent group…
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Keeping France’s Occitan language alive
Post-revolutionary France tried to stamp it out, but working class communities kept speaking it. Now Occitan powers a vivacious and political European music scene It’s May Day in Marseille, and beyond the celebrations – and the ongoing protests against President Macron raising the retirement age – another smaller but just as potent group are taking…
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This Is the Room Your Favorite Song Came From
LISTEN HERE This summer, Nashville was buzzing with the news that one of the most prolific music studios in a city full of them, RCA Studio A, had been sold to a developer who intended to tear it down and build condominiums. Studio A isn’t the only landmark in town — RCA Studio B, where Elvis recorded,…
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Honeyboy Edwards
LISTEN HERE Before he was a famous blues guitarist known as “Honeyboy,” David Edwards was a different kind of legend — a boxcar hobo. Gianluca Tramontana visited him on the South Side of Chicago.
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Cuban Organ
LISTEN HERE Music journalist Gianluca Tramontana took a bumpy, 8-hour bus ride from Havana to the remote eastern province of Granma —- the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane country — to find an extraordinary relic: a hand-cranked mechanical organ that is still the life of the party.
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The J&M Records Story
LISTEN HERE At the edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter sits the Clothes Spin Laundromat. Sixty years ago, rock ‘n’ roll took its baby steps there. As Gianluca Tramontana discovered, it’s a hidden piece of music history.
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Blues Skies for B.B. King
It’s good to be the King — B.B. King, to be specific. In the last month, the legendary bluesman saw his collaboration with Eric Clapton, Riding with the King, debut at No. 3 on the nation’s album chart and his classy B.B. King Blues Club & Grill open in the tourist hotbed of New York’s Times Square. Of course, as…
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