Culture

David Holt

Forty years ago David Holt visited the Appalachian Mountains for the first time and began immersing himself in the music and stories he heard there. Since then, he has studied with many people and taught many more. Today, all...

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Joe Henry

I first encountered Joe Henry's name when I heard Garth Brooks's "Belleau Wood," a fabulously detailed and evocative song about the Christmas truce of 1914. Henry started out in country and Americana music,...

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Letters to Sala

During World War II, sixteen-year-old Polish Jew Sala Garncarz was sent to a Nazi slave labor camp. She brought along a leather satchel. In between inspections and camp work, she gave the satchel to fellow prisoners, buried it,...

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Noism08

Still contending with the loss of George Balanchine twenty-five years on — the legendary choreographer and New York City Ballet founder died in 1983 — the dance world tends to pin its hopes for fresh new ballets on a...

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The Goldbergs transcribed

Like so many other classical music fans, violinist Aaron Berofsky says he grew up listening to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And like so many other classical music fans, the full-time...

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Dean and Bolina

For the last few decades the U-M has had a graduate program in creative writing, but the town very seldom gets a sense of the students who pass through it. They are busy, after all, and here only for a couple of years. They form...

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Carolina Chocolate Drops

The Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...

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Morath and Miller

Mao Zedong’s lumpily stuffed white horse in Yanan’s Revolutionary Museum, Zhou Enlai’s black crank telephone, and a woman worker’s spartan concrete apartment-cell next to a socialist “Workshop for...

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Powertrane

I'm too young to remember the Detroit rock scene of the 1960s — and I'm not that young. In fact I had to take a nap in the afternoon to stay up for the headliner of a recent three-band Blind Pig show. So when Scott...

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Rory Block

There's only a modest audience today for the white performers of the 1960s who made pilgrimages to learn the southern black acoustic guitar music known as the country blues. But several of them are still around, and, as with...

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D-E-A-R S-A-N-T-A

I love Christmas music — the carols, the classics, even many of the novelty tunes; perhaps a surprising admission from a Jewish boy who as a child never sang them, or even heard them much. Okay, you're waiting for the...

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Todd Deatherage

Don't let the name fool you (even though that last syllable is pronounced with a long A). Todd Deatherage is not goth or heavy metal or punk. This young singer, songwriter, and electric guitarist, recently transplanted to...

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The Huron Gun Collectors

A handmade sign is taped to the front door at the monthly Huron Gun Collectors meeting at the Washtenaw County Farm Council Grounds. It says, "Cameras, video equipment, tape recorders, and concealed weapons strictly...

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Over the Rhine

Over the Rhine, which takes its name from a tough but increasingly creative area near downtown Cincinnati, essentially consists of vocalist Karin Bergquist and pianist and guitarist Linford Detweiler. They write almost all their...

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The Concert for Peace

Once a year Michigan Peaceworks throws a fund-raising party at the Ark. When I arrived last year, I found a gaggle of local singer-songwriters and musicians lining the back halls, waiting to play their one song each. Engineers...

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Robert Hass

Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, won the National Book Award a couple of weeks ago for his most recent collection, Time and Materials. Hass has never shied away from ambitious titles — a couple of...

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Cellist Sarah Cleveland

Some kids want to grow up to be president. Not Sarah Cleveland. “I always knew I wanted to be an orchestral player,” says the principal cellist of the Ann Arbor Symphony. Cleveland grew up in Livonia in the 1960s....

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