American Song
America was meant to be a light on the hill — a place others looked to when they needed to find their own way forward.
If America has ever truly been that light, it came from its music. From the people who suffered the most and somehow still found something worth singing about.
From colonial taverns to protest marches in the Eastern Bloc, from gospel churches to a ghetto in Soweto, American rhythms helped people band together, speak truth, and refuse to quit. Our songs became the world's songs — not because we exported them, but because people who needed hope reached out and claimed them as their own.
American Song tells the stories of the artists who made the music and the people who were moved by it. One era at a time. One genre, one band, one song at a time. Music that started by campfires, in cotton fields, in churches and juke joints — and moved out into the world to become something larger than any one nation could contain.
This is American Song.
American Song
Latest Episodes
Independent Artists: A.J. Deiboldt - Nashville, TN
Today on American Song, I’ll introduce you to my friend, A.J. Deiboldt. A.J. is a singer-songwriter originally from upstate New York, now making his music in a small town in the woods of Tennessee just outside Nashville. American Song is a show...
Dancing Under Fire: Blood in the Groove — Los Prisioneros, Soda Stereo, D.A.F., and Brenda Fassie
New Wave was born in a New York dive bar, then it got on a plane. In England it picked up eyeliner and a synthesizer where its guitar used to be. But somewhere over the Atlantic, in a few very specific places, it also picked up something heavie...
New Wave: The Conquerors - The Second British Invasion, and How Michael Jackson and Prince Broke Down the Walls at MTV
Britain just turned the lights fluorescent. The future arrives every Wednesday now, whether you're ready or not.Picture 1979 England: factories closing, Thatcher cutting glass with every syllable, and a music press so brutal it co...
The New Wave Fun House: Blondie, Talking Heads, DEVO, The Cars, Oingo Boingo
It was the late 1970s and early '80s. New York was bankrupt. Akron's tire factories were closing. Regular families were struggling with double-digit inflation. The AIDS epidemic was raging. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US boycotted t...
New Wave — Up From the Ooze (How Kraftwerk, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and CBGB - a Twelve-Foot Room on the Bowery - Accidentally Invented the Future)
Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly explod...