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It’s taken a few months, since he lives in the Netherlands, but Eric Andersen finally found time to watch A Complete Unknown. And the troubadour legend, who haunted those same Village clubs during that same time, was…a bit underwhelmed.

“It seemed a little sugarcoated,” he says. ”It was a little two-dimensional. But I found it quite amusing and quite entertaining. I was looking at it more like a cinematic situation than something I knew. I was watching a movie. So, I enjoyed it from that standpoint.”

Then again,...

Over the past few years, an array of musicians, historians, researchers, and critics have helped upend the history of country music. They’ve brought overdue attention to the myriad, yet long-ignored contributions of Black musicians to country’s origins, stressing the way record company owners overlooked Black artists for recording sessions, or slapped bogus genre terms on the songs they did record (“race records”) to differentiate them from the similar tunes recorded by white artists.

With all this knowledge far more well-known now than it ever has been, it was...

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The adage comes from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, made by John Ford, the undisputed master of a genre that plays with the disparity between American myth and reality like no other. The new four-part Curiosity Stream docuseries The Real Wild West tries its own hand at this task, dutifully highlighting stories and figures that have traditionally received short shrift from Hollywood and other purveyors of pop culture. Black cowboys, fearless madams, conquistadors, the Trail of Tears, the depletion of the buffalo,...

The famed wild west, where outlaws rampage and lawmen become legends. The wild west is Hollywood’s great script, and the upcoming four-part docuseries The Real Wild West tells the real story of the era, with our exclusive clip teasing what’s to come from the Curiosity Stream series. You can check out the exclusive clip from The Real Wild West above.

The Real Wild West, premiering globally on 29 June on Curiosity Stream in the US along with partner channels worldwide, is the definitive story of the American West – beyond the gunslingers and lawmen — where a diverse group of pioneers shaped a county and built the foundation for modern America. Join Grammy award-winning musician and bard Dom Flemons for a ride into the past... to meet the Black and Hispanic cowboys, female homesteaders, immigrants, and tribal leaders who faced unprecedented opportunity, ambition, fortune, and technological marvels to forge new paths across the wilderness.

A new Robert Johnson biography and a box set of previously unheard field recordings are among the first releases the Smithsonian and Folkways are planning from the collection of storied folklorist Robert “Mack” McCormick.

The Johnson book — Biography of a Phantom — will be released on April 4, with the new box set titled Playing for the Man at the Door out August 4. The National Museum of American History will also start exhibiting items from McCormick’s collection on June 23, with the display running for two years. More releases and events centered...

Variety film music writer Jon Burlingame has been named among the winners of the 2021 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards, awarded by a jury of experts for outstanding coverage of music in the forms of print, broadcast, liner notes or new media.

Burlingame won the ASCAP Foundation Paul Williams “Loved the Liner Notes” Award for his 4,000-word essay that was included on a recent expanded reissue of the “Midnight Cowboy” film soundtrack on Quartet Records. Burlingame — also the host of the “Disney for Scores” podcast and a prolific liner notes writer, as well as journalist and professor — is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on movie music.

Among other recipients, New York Times writer Daphne A. Brooks won the award for an article in the pop field for “100 Years Ago, ‘Crazy Blues’ Sparked a Revolution for Black Women Fans.”

Another award for a New York...

Charli Xcx, Laura Jane Grace, David Lynch and more will appear during Bonnaroo’s 2020 Virtual Roo-Ality festival, streaming September 24th through 26th on YouTube.

The event will boast a mix of original programming, new performances and a handful of classic sets from the Bonnaroo archives, including the full-length streaming premiere of what turned out to be the Beastie Boys’ final live show at Bonnaroo 2009. A complete schedule will be announced soon.

Artists set to partake in Virtual Roo-Ality include Jamila Woods, Ashley McBryde, Nathaniel Rateliff, Denzel Curry, Tank and the Bangas,...

Roots-music trio Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band adds a fourth member in Dom Flemons for a high-octane cover of “Shake Your Money Maker.” The musicians convened at Sun Records Studio in Memphis in late 2019 to re-create the Elmore James blues standard, which they had first performed together as a jam at the Blues Music Awards earlier that year.

It’s a particularly fierce take, with a guitar assist from Stax Records icon Steve Cropper and Scot Sutherland on bass. Their full-throttle version deftly blends elements of roadhouse blues with...

Since co-founding the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005, Dom Flemons has conducting a scholarly exploration of American roots music’s many nooks and crannies, earning himself the nickname “the American Songster.” In 2014, he doubled down on that reputation with his seminal album Prospect Hill. Now that LP is being repackaged and reissued in a deluxe edition called Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus, due out February 28th via Omnivore Recordings.

The new package spans two discs and includes the original 14 tracks of Prospect Hill on one disc, and then a second...

When folk-singer Dom Flemons began delving into the cultural history of African-Americans in the West a few years ago, he conceived the subject as a quirky passion project. “At first it was just casual research,” he says. “But when I found out one in four cowboys in the West were African-American cowboys, that sent me on a trajectory to figure something out: Why don’t I hear more about black cowboys in contemporary culture?”

The end result of Flemons’ curiosity was Black Cowboys, released last spring, a deeply historically-minded album...

The 2018 AmericanaFest kicks off in two weeks, bringing more than 500 shows and 60 panels to Nashville.

The festival announced its lineup of panelists, lecturers and interviewees this morning. Included in the mix are k.d. lang, who doubles as this year’s keynote speaker and Americana Trailblazer Award recipient. She’ll also serve as a sort of musical bookend, kicking off AmericanaFest’s special programming with a keynote address — delivered in a Q&A format with NPR critic Ann Powers — before hitting the Ryman Auditorium several days later for the Nashville...