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Uncle Earl got himself born right here in Ann Arbor. He sprang fully formed and thoroughly functional from the fertile minds, nimble fingers, and soulful voices of singer-songwriters K. C. Groves and Jo Serrapere and fiddle...

Someday, gathered around a postapocalyptic campfire on the Huron, Ann Arbor's surviving classical music lovers will sit and reminisce about the good old days. The conversation might start when somebody recalls that the...

The first time you hear Bill Staines sing in his down-to-earth, unpretentious voice, you might be surprised to learn that it's a voice agile and acrobatic enough to have earned him a National Yodeling Championship....

The great thing about being a folk-rock cover band in the 21st century is there’s so much darn good music to cover. The challenge is to make it sound good when so many professionals have already recorded these songs. Local...

Tiny gnarled nests of black lines freckle three barn-door-sized slabs of green drywall. This aerial map of Detroit shows no highways or roads, only the city's culs-de-sac — those attempts to create homey harbors in...

Among the many virtues of U-M professor Linda Gregerson's poetry are its extraordinary sentences. Long and richly textured, they often start with precise observation, detour down the byways and digressions of thought, and...

I'm a sucker for books placed in northern Michigan. That's simply because the area that begins somewhere north of Traverse City and keeps moving north across the straits and then across Lake Superior to Canada and down...

For many, the word tango conjures full-contact dance and music on the accordion — actually a bandoneón, or German concertina — that's equal parts sultriness and late-night despair. Then, a bit more than...

The drum holds a privileged place in the jazz tradition and in many ways best symbolizes the African roots of the music. There have been some extraordinary jazz percussionist composers — just think of Denzil Best, Max...

The traditional music of the Quebec trio De Temps Antan ("Yesteryear") is all acoustic, but you might say it has a reliable power supply. The main engine is foot percussion, known in French as podorythmie. It's...