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
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...
The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (2)
Part 2Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....)Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of...
The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (1)
Part 1Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....)Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of...
Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Part Five - Last Man Standing
Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway, ...