Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, was a folk-blues giant whose music and persona transformed American culture. He sang what he lived (poverty, priso...
Eric Andersen came to music through Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the Beats, and his own inveterate wanderlust. After a teen odyssey that took him to San Francisco where...
Though Laura Nyro's songs are familiar to millions of people–through hit versions by Three Dog Night, the 5th Dimension and others–she herself remained in the s...
Reverend Gary Davis (1896-1972), guitar virtuoso and folk-blues giant, moved from Durham, N.C. to New York City, where he struggled for years as a blind street ...
The Argentine musical master Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was a disrupter, in the manner of Stravinsky, the Dadaists, Bob Dylan and, yes, even the Sex Pistols (o...
One scene in the miniseries The Queen’s Gambit was all it took to put the Dutch rock band Shocking Blue, and the band’s sultry singer, Mariska Veres, back on th...
When George Harrison released his epic “triple album” on November 27, 1970, Beatle fans worldwide realized the gig was up, that no band was big enough to hold t...
The supremely talented guitarist, writer and singer of both grimly funny and beautifully romantic songs, co-founder of Fairport Convention and, with Linda Peter...
Though Brian Jones brought world-wide notice to these Moroccan master musicians in the early 1970s, their tradition goes back a millennium. Beyond Jones and the...
Musician and writer John Kruth met with Allen Ginsberg two months before the great poet’s death. He was there ostensibly to talk about Rahsaan Roland Kirk while...
Born in the wake of a legendarily disruptive high school performance and culminating in a near riot at Carnegie Hall, Violent Femmes, the folk-rock-punk trio fr...
The coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands of people worldwide, each a tragedy to their friends and families. But the music world has lost some giants, too, ...
John Kruth is the author of six music books, including Hold On World – the Lasting Impact of John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band (2021) a regular contributor to Waxpoetics, and numerous periodicals. As a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with ten solo albums Kruth has recorded and performed regularly in the U.S. and Europe working with Hal Willner, John Prine, Violent Femmes, James “Blood” Ulmer, and Ornette Coleman.
