Saturday, August 17, 2019

Turning The Tables Celebrates Maybelle Carter; A Lost Album From John Coltrane Is Found

Plus, the allegations against Plácido Domingo.
NPR Music
GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images
This year, Turning the Tables — NPR Music’s series that challenges and rethinks the popular music canon — is focused on celebrating eight women who shaped, defined and invented American popular music. 

This week, we highlighted the music of Maybelle Carter, the Mother of Country Music. A matriarch and mentor who never stopped working, Carter transcended boundaries — both musical and geographic — and continues to inspire musicians today. Tift Merritt calls Carter a “quiet revolutionary” and “the kind of woman I have always wanted to be.” And as Courtney Marie Andrews puts it, she’s perhaps the most emulated guitar player of all time. 

Andrews even demonstrated for us how to play the “Carter scratch,” a way of playing the guitar that forever changed the genre. We’ve also got a rich annotated playlist to introduce you to Carter’s music — and that of her peers, influences and inheritors. 

Hello stranger,
Marissa Lorusso and Lyndsey McKenna

New Music

  • In reimagining The Highwaymen's outlaw track “Highwayman,” The Highwomen — the supergroup of Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby — become empathetic revolutionaries, complete with assists from Sheryl Crow and ascending British singer Yola.
  • Go beyond Music Row and explore the Nashville music scene beyond the bright lights and busy bars of Broadway: In our latest Slingshot City Scenes report, WMOT Roots Radio introduces you to 10 rising acts you need to know.
  • For the first time in two decades, Sleater-Kinney's lineup has changed, and the band's new sound has sparked intense reaction from listeners. For writer Hanif Abdurraquib, assessing The Center Won't Hold meant moving past nostalgia and expectation.
  • In 1964, John Coltrane recorded an album that you haven’t heard — yet. Blue World was used to score a docufictional film, Le chat dans le sac, but then went unreleased for 55 years. The world will finally get a chance to hear it on Sept. 27.
  • After a long vacation, Robin Hilton’s back at the helm of All Songs Considered’s New Music Friday! On this week’s sprint through the week’s best albums, we’re featuring Boston rapper Cousin Stizz, R&B singer Snoh Aalegra, country singer Lillie Mae and the literary, celebratory music of The Hold Steady.

Featuring

  • Fifty years after the Woodstock Music and Art Fair took place there, the little town of Bethel, N.Y. is on the National Register of Historic Places. For some who were there, it's a place of pilgrimage and memories.
  • This week, The Associated Press published multiple allegations of sexual harassment over the course of some 30 years against Plácido Domingo, one of the world's most powerful and recognizable opera stars. One of the accusers, Patricia Wulf, spoke to All Things Considered about her encounters with Domingo and the allegations raised against him.
  • In April 2018, Los Tigres del Norte performed inside California's Folsom Prison, both as a tribute to Johnny Cash's historic 1968 concert and an attempt at raising awareness of its shifting population. Next month, a Netflix documentary and a live album recorded in the prison will be released in time for Hispanic Heritage Month.
  • Fifty years ago, Miles Davis turned the jazz world upside down with the recording of  Bitches Brew. This week, Jazz Night in America takes you behind the furious mystique of that album, illuminating the musical and cultural forces Miles was metabolizing at the time.

Tiny Desk

Amr Alfiky/NPR
It's not every day someone walks into our NPR Music offices and unpacks an instrument made in 1680. And yet Kian Soltani, the 27-year-old cellist who plays with the authority and poetry of someone twice his age, didn’t exactly seem fazed by the rare Giovanni Grancino cello he played during his Tiny Desk concert.

One More Thing

Maybe the real magic was the friends we made along the way.

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