Henry Carrigan

It’s fitting that Jamie Fisher’s Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith opens with an epigraph from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard: “The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him and from time to time have an equal claim to be the man himself.

Forty years ago, on August 25, 1986, Paul Simon released his seminal album, Graceland. On it, Simon collaborated with a number of South African musicians, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Vusi Kumalo, Bakithi Kumalo, and Ray Chikapa Phiri, among many others. As music historian Ashley Khan (A Love Supreme) points out

Before Martin Luther King, Jr., rose to deliver his now-iconic speech at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, Mahalia Jackson riveted the quarter million attendees congregated on the Washington Mall with her stirring performances of “I’ve Been Buked and

We often refer to certain pieces of music, usually popular songs or albums associated with memorable experiences (whether happy or sad) or significant swathes of time, as the soundtrack of our lives. Every now and then, a song comes on the radio and in that moment we’re transported to