2007 May

Her bio states that Iris DeMent started singing when she was three years old, but I bet she started earlier than that. I bet she sang the day, the minute she was born. And I bet she sang a gospel song. In the liner notes for her...

When the annual Jewish Film Festival returns to the Michigan Theater Sunday through Thursday, May 6-10, it will bring movies from more than half a dozen countries. The range of subjects in the nineteen films featured is even...

In 1980 Ann Arborite Joan Blos won the prestigious Newbery Medal for her young adult novel A Gathering of Days. That story was told in the form of the journal of a thirteen-year-old farm girl from the early 1830s. The journal...

More than most genres, the blues is replete with remarkable life stories, and that of Mississippi Heat frontman Pierre Lacocque is especially fascinating. The son of a Belgian Protestant minister and often penniless Old...

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Dan Orcutt has been making music in this town for about fifteen years. Like his other bands, the Nick Strange Trio is professional and tight, and Orcutt's vocals are still rich. But in the few...

The layers of Norah Jones's voice shine softly in the illumination cast by a tune. The voice seems too ordinary to have fascinated listeners as it has, but its grain is unique. Born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar in 1979, she...

One highlight of the U-M Graduate Library’s absorbing transportation exhibition is a slender, pocket-size 1913 directory that lists all of the few owned cars in Michigan — “a combination social register and...

It's not easy having a dual career as a player and a teacher. On the one hand, you have the repertoire to learn, the practicing to do, and the performances to give. On the other, there are the students to teach, the meetings...

My family and I attended the Twenty-sixth Annual Australian Shepherd Dog Trials on a lark. At the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds, the morning was breezy and sunny, perfect for watching dogs perform. The beautifully brushed...