Woody Guthrie Audio

Jakob Dylan is best known as the leader of the alternative group The Wallflowers -- and as the son of a certain American music legend. On the Rick Rubin-produced solo album Seeing Things, Dylan offers up acoustic folk songs that touch on war, evil and the apocalypse – reminding some of, well, an earlier Dylan. He joins us for a live in-studio performance. Jakob Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels perform tonight at the Blender Theater at Gramercy . Doors at 8 p.m.

When they lived in Greenwich Village in 1961 they were cherub-cheeked kids. She was 17, came by subway from Queens and was called Suze Rotolo . He was 20, came from Minnesota and was called Bob Dylan. Almost 50 years later, Suze finally wrote a memoir of her life next to the American icon, just before and during the start of the flood of fame. Suze Rotolo joins us to talk about her book, "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties." Our blog : John Schaefer on bearing witness to music history Tell us : Were you part of a historic moment in music? Did you know it at the time?

Country music goes back much further than Hank Williams or Johnny Cash - all the way to the 19th century. It's an early history of colorful characters and surprising musical innovations. We'll talk to Tony Russell , a country music historian, and author of the new book, "Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost." Our Blog : John Schaefer's thoughts on country music.

Kurt looks into the tricky relationship between money and the big-time art world. And we’ll hear how folk music keeps on ticking. A folk music collector explains his scramble to save America’s traditional sounds one field recording at a time. A 92-year-old blues legend, Honeyboy Edwards, remembers his lean days as a boxcar hobo. And outspoken English folk rocker Billy Bragg, who has a new record out, stops by to perform.

Kurt looks into the tricky relationship between money and the big-time art world. And we’ll hear how folk music keeps on ticking. A folk music collector explains his scramble to save America’s traditional sounds one field recording at a time. A 92-year-old blues legend, Honeyboy Edwards, remembers his lean days as a boxcar hobo. And outspoken English folk rocker Billy Bragg, who has a new record out, stops by to perform.

As the season opens, Fay Vincent , former baseball commissioner and author of We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved looks back to the pre-free agency (and pre-steroid) era.

Show Summary: how earmarks became pork; the politics of high fashion; and betting on the election

Show Summary: reporting recession, the death of the Daily Worker and a year of murders

The hard-luck, God-fearing country music of the 1920s and ‘30s is the ancestor of today’s polished Nashville sound. The new book Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost charts the genre’s family tree, from big names like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to lesser-known musicians (whose stories the book tells for the first time). We talk with author and historian Tony Russell .

Some of the greatest shape-shifters of all time. Throughout his career Bob Dylan tried out several different personas, and filmmaker Todd Haynes captures them in his new biopic, I’m Not There . Actor Scott Shepherd takes on Hamlet by channeling a 1960s Richard Burton. And writer Jonah Lehrer tells us how science is just now proving what artists like Whitman and Cezanne observed over a century ago.