David Masciotra

John Trudell, the legendary Native American poet, activist, and musician, likened Elvis Presley to the “Baby boom Che” in his poem about the rock-and-roll icon. Elvis “showed us an out,” Trudell writes, from the “psychotic pall.” He showed “everyboyman and everygirlwoman there’s something good in feeling good.” Trudell’s

“We’re not here to change your mind about anything,” Charlie Starr, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Blackberry Smoke, announced from the stage at a recent live performance in Chicago. “We’re here to ease your mind about everything.” The infectious melodies, thoughtful lyrics, anthemic choruses, and, most of

Music is more than a jingle, more than a product. To committed composers, players, singers, and listeners, it’s an essential form of transmission for genuine feeling and ideas to the human spirit. For Lizz Wright, a magnificent vocalist whose rich baritone manages to hit the frequency of the beating

“Blues is like a witness,” Ruthie Foster said with a delicate voice while warming her throat with a cup of tea in a conference room of the Freedom Hall in Park Forest, Illinois. Beyond the way that a masterful blues guitarist bends a lick, or a great singer lets out

“When American leadership boasts of exporting democracy,” a regal and majestic Jesse Jackson, wearing a three piece suit behind an ornate pulpit declared, “They do not talk of Jeffersonian democracy.” Any system that includes the enslavement of citizens with a certain skin pigmentation, the subjugation of women, and the disenfranchisement

James Lee Burke, one of the world’s best novelists, wrote that “the most important battles are often fought in places no one has heard of.” In a paradoxical America that is increasingly fractured and fragmented, and yet productive of a singular culture where technology and mainline media erase regional