Audiofiles!

It’s fitting that Dick Clark seemed to defy the ravages of time since he hosted the long-running “American Bandstand,” which helped bring rock’n’roll into the mainstream.

The drummer backed Bob Dylan and sang with Van Morrison. Three decades after The Band split and ten years after a diagnosis of throat cancer, he put out a solo album.

Jad Abumrad goes looking for the devil, in search of the truth behind the legend of one of the most haunting, shadowy figures in music — American blues singer Robert Johnson.

Nneka’s music is a mixture of Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, and folk. As a teenager, she moved from Nigeria to Germany, her mother’s home country. “I was a foreigner, and I was treated like a foreigner. Despite the fact that I had both passports.”

“One of the greatest gifts I’ve gotten from SNL is getting out of my comfort zone,” Wiig says. “The first handful of years that I was there, most of my characters were ladies in their 40s with short hair and weird sweaters that no one wanted at their dinner party.”

Tod Machover is recognized as one of the most innovative composers of his generation. He has astounded the world with his avant-garde musical explorations, including an opera staged with robots. He’s also an inventor, changing the way people make music.

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, the renowned folksinger and bluesman, performed with pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax on WNYC in 1944.

A look back at the late, great Earl Scruggs. The bluegrass pioneer took the humble five-string banjo out of the rhythm section and made it a solo star at the front of the band.

In 1971, something new hit the TV screens of America. Don Cornelius stepped in front of live cameras and introduced “Soul Train,” putting at front and center a world Americans had never seen before on a national mainstream show.

The singer-songwriter still remembers when she first hit the music scene in Nashville and LA and was told she was “too rock for country” and “too country for rock.”

Starlee Kine plays matchmaker to form a band that’s made entirely out of the classifieds.

John Coltrane recorded the album in 1964 and released it the following year. In many ways, it mirrors Coltrane’s spiritual quest that grew out of his personal troubles.

Bill Ferris is one of the country’s leading folklorists. As a boy, Bill began going to church with his family’s housekeeper, and fell in love with the music and the drama. A few years later, he hit the road with recording equipment, and discovered the blues.

Artists often wonder if the distractions of the modern world compromise their creativity. Andrew Bird put the theory to the test. “Let’s see what happens when I stop listening to records, move out in the middle of nowhere, and have the space to experiment.”

Delivering a sort of pocket history of rock music, Bruce Springsteen talked about how doo-wop taught him about sex, country music helped him understand despair, and Woody Guthrie revealed the political roots of the fatalism he’d heard in Hank Williams.

“I think that’s one of the beautiful things about Gram Parsons,” says Polly Parsons. “He’s one of the rare artists you can hear his spirit and his sadness in his music.”

Some have called the song an alternative national anthem. Others say it’s a Marxist response to “God Bless America.” Written and first sung by Woody Guthrie, it probably borrowed heavily from a 1930 gospel recording by the Carter Family. From

Without Charlie Parker, bebop as we know it might never have existed. While other musicians — Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk among them — created the building blocks, Parker’s innovative phrasing brought it all together as a new jazz revolution.

The conductor has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping people to realize their untapped love for it — and by extension, their untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, and new connections.

An autotune remix of footage from TED talks, Carl Sagan documentaries, Discovery Channel programming, and other things brain. From the Symphony of Science series.

A closer look at Yoko Ono’s role in the Beatles break up, the complicated relationship with Paul McCartney, and surprising stories behind his most recognizable songs.

An exploration of the Gershwin tune, and its many interpretations.

The tradition of siblings singing together is as old as song.

Joseph Guillotin and Henry Shrapnel became immortal by entering the English language. But when your life is reduced to a single definition, the results can be upsetting.

In 2002, John Osborne won a competition on legendary BBC broadcaster John Peel’s radio show. His prize was a box of records from Peel’s shed that took eight years to listen to. When he finally finished, he made this ode to radio and those records.

Every country song tells a story and has a story behind it. An iconic George Jones number, almost too sad to be sung; Woody Guthrie’s harrowing past; why everyone sings about Abilene; cowboys in Mongolia and Johnny Cash in Afghanistan.

In March of 1940, a young Woody Guthrie sat for a series of oral history interviews for the Library of Congress archives. The recordings offer a glimpse of Guthrie’s early music style and a frank account of his harrowing past.

Jack DeJohnette is a drum legend. But he started out on the piano. Inspired by Fats Domino, he’d begun a promising career when he heard Ahmad Jamal’s 1958 album. He was entranced by the drummer, who had a particular way of handling brushes.

Musician David Berkeley has gotten a lot of requests in his life, but none quite like this one. A fan wanted Berkeley to come to his house and help save his relationship by serenading the troubled couple with a personal concert.

“What I was doing was trying to be a glamour girl,” the singer told Terry Gross. “I had been a tomboy most of the time. And I wanted to look grown, you know, I want to wear tall high-heeled shoes, and fishtail gowns, and big long rhinestone earrings.”

A song so sad that George Jones was initially reluctant to record it. Yet it became one of the most popular songs in country music.

Pondering the mysteries of the popular song.

The interview begins with Terry Gross mispronouncing Simmons’ original Hebrew last name; he tells her it’s because she has a Gentile mouth. It’s only downhill from there. Simmons refused to allow the interview to be posted online by NPR.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra version of the game’s theme song.

She rose at dusk, sang, rehearsed, performed, ate and drank and sang until dawn. Then she slept all day and began to create and unravel again as the sun went down.

The history of the modern shopping mall, told by people living in a real, yet unnamed, city. Scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or worse.

Lucia Betts is 6. She’s noticed some certain inconsistencies in the Santa story.

A crack addict finds Jesus, gets off drugs and rings bells at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Oh, and he never stops singing, either.

It might seem hyperbole to claim, as many Wagnerites do, that The Ring Cycle is the greatest work of art ever. But the grandeur and power of this monumental work have permeated our culture from Star Wars to Bugs Bunny to J.R.R. Tolkien.

“It’s marvelous when we’re surprised by coincidences,” the composer said. “That’s one of the beautiful things about hunting mushrooms — is that they grow up and are fresh at just a particular moment, and our lives are actually characterized by moments.”

With her rich, throaty voice, the singer has reinvented her sound in the decades since her start in 1950 — working with the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Prince, and Bob Dylan.

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is a native of Ghana, the son of a king. Instead of tribal politics, Ali chose to leave Ghana for the United States and became a musician and writer. But he hasn’t left behind the memories of a song from his childhood.

What began as a promotion for his new album turned into two hours of rare Beatle stories and playing DJ — introducing the music, commercials and weather.

One of the last songs Johnny Cash recorded was “There Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down).” It was written in 1934 by a 12-year-old boy named Claude Ely, who went on to become a Pentecostal preacher known to followers as Brother Claude.

The Canadian singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, Metals, is a bit more chaotic and liberating. It’s “about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for,” Feist says. She performs four songs from the album.

The frontman for Antony and the Johnsons says everything changed for him when he discovered the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. “I decided he was my art parent. Someone who’s footsteps I would follow in. I would trust him.”

A solo project from Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor.

The town of Baudette, Minnesota, sits on the US/Canadian border. It’s home to a now-decommissioned Coast Guard tower built to guide people across and around the Great Lakes. The band Mountain Man helps to tell this story of navigation gone wrong.

Blues musician Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had 57 children, some of whom were happier than others to learn of their father’s prolific paternity.

Julia Easterlin describes her performing style as “musical sudoku.” When the 22-year-old walks into a room, she is equipped with just a backpack. She unpacks her rectangular looping machine, which essentially creates a one-woman chorus.

“I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor,” Eno says.

Chaim and Billy both lived in Williamsburg, but in worlds that almost never collided. Chaim was a Hasidic Jew; Billy was the star of an underground band. When Billy put Chaim into his band, in one year, he leapt from the 19th century into the 21st.

The odd power of the cover band. One day in Afghanistan, the reporter started playing “Those Were the Days My Friend” on his accordion. His translator, shocked, asks, “How do you know Afghan music?” And so we learn the tale of Afghan Elvis.

In 2005, the singer, then 24, didn’t have a piano in her apartment, so she went to the Baldwin Piano showroom in Midtown Manhattan to play some new compositions.

Merrill Garbus’ second album, w h o k i l l, explores themes of sexuality, femininity, class and violence, with Garbus’ witty lyrics alternately delivered in animalistic bursts, tender coos and yodels. She performs four songs from the album.

Bill Withers is the singer-songwriter behind classics like Ain’t No Sunshine, Lean on Me, Use Me and Lovely Day. Withers retired in the mid 1980s and, with the exception of a few songs penned for other artists, has stayed out of the public eye.

Why does a country music star and all-American guy — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story.

Early in his career, musician Dan Deacon embarked on an eight-week tour. Totally broke, when the car died, he had no choice but to finish the trip by Greyhound bus.

In Faulkner County, Arkansas, there’s been a gold-rush like influx of natural gas fracking in the community, with over 3,000 new wells drilled in the area. At the same time, there’s been a mysterious wave of thousands of small earthquakes. Musician Bonnie “Prince” Billy wrote an original song to contribute to the narrative.

For the celebrity chef, the song “96 Tears” was a gateway drug to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, not to mention a narcotic-fueled roadtrip and a dead stripper.

Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens is introduced to the Arkansas town of Brinkley, a farming town not far from where the ivory-billed woodpecker was recently rediscovered. That the bird is not extinct has brought a ray of hope to the residents.

Wow. Once left out of a 1965 concert recording, this version of Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” is slowed to a breathtaking crawl.

Music philosopher Greil Marcus listens back and hears Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Lady Gaga, The Manson Family — the existential dread of a generation.

On finishing an album: “By the time you’re done, you don’t even want to hear it for a year. The songs have kind of grown up around you like vines, and you just want to distance yourself from it. And then when you hear it, it’s like an old buddy.”

Sam, an 18-year-old from Indiana, was brought to the US by his parents as a young child, but his family overstayed their visas. It wasn’t until Sam was asked to provide a Social Security number for college that the fact that he’s undocumented really hit home.

From a little workshop in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Wayne Henderson makes what may be the most beautiful and beautifully-voiced guitars in the world.

In the 1930s, Ina Ray Hutton was strutting her stuff as a sexy blonde jazz singer. Decades later, a news reporter looked at one of her albums and felt something was odd: the blonde bombshell, she thought, might have been black.

The steel drum was first created in Trinidad, hammered from biscuit boxes, brake drums and oil barrels. One of the biggest “steel pan” bands of the 1960s gained worldwide fame when an unlikely patron heard their act and took them on tour.

Welch and Rawlings perform an in-studio concert featuring songs from the long-awaited The Harrow and the Harvest. “There’s a lot of stuff on this album dealing with unfulfilled expectations and when things don’t exactly go as you had thought or wished they would — and the true adult nature of dealing with that,” Welch says.

Together, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger created some of the most iconic rock ‘n’ roll songs of the 20th century. But the opening line of one of The Rolling Stones’ most famous hits wasn’t a collaboration. The riff came to Richards in a dream.

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide, Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The rapper and record mogul discusses his childhood and the stories behind his most famous songs.

Dr. Oliver Sacks called her “Mrs. O’C.” She was Irish. She was old. And she had a problem: One night, while sleeping in her room at a Catholic old people’s home in the Bronx, she was awakened by a voice, a female voice singing Irish ballads.

A 1965 Syd Barrett song recorded as a demo with Pink Floyd before they had formed.

When country music legend Willie Nelson was a child, he heard a heavenly tune coming through his front door that’s been under his skin ever since.

Cellist Zoe Keating discusses the physics (if not metaphysics) of looping sound and how to use a 17th century instrument to make avant-garde electronic music.