Music

Justin Townes Earle, the award-winning singer-songwriter and son of Steve Earle, has died. He was 38.

Earle's death was announced in a post on his Facebook page that reads:

It is with tremendous sadness that we inform you of the passing of our son, husband, father and friend Justin. So many of you have relied on his music and lyrics over the years and we hope that his music will continue to guide you on your journeys.

No cause of death was given.

"I feel like we kind of manifested this."

That's Becca Mancari's playful, pop-psychology-informed proclamation to her music-making peer and fellow interviewee S.G. Goodman, near the end of our three-way Zoom session. Mancari is referring to the sense of kinship the two singer-songwriters have shared ever since a six-month period several years back, when they were both based in Nashville. Of course, we at World Cafe were unaware that they had a track record of comparing outlooks, talking shop and even, on one occasion, sharing the use of a tour van.

Steve Grossman, a saxophonist whose lunging projection, sure rhythmic footing and clarity of attack helped propel him into the spotlight in the 1970s, notably in bands led by Miles Davis and Elvin Jones, died on Aug. 13 at Glen Cove Hospital in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 69. The cause was cardiac arrest after a long illness, his brother Myles Grossman confirmed to NPR.

A lot of summer camps had to close this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including Camp Aranu'tiq in New Hampshire, a camp for transgender and nonbinary children. Julie Be is a music therapist who has helped run the camp since it was founded in 2009 and also one half of the children's musical duo Ants on a Log, alongside Anya Rose. So the stuck-at-home campers would feel connected, Be and Rose put out an open call for songs that reflect the trans and nonbinary experience, use gender neutral pronouns or use humor to talk about gender.

We're back with season two of Play It Forward, where we talk with artists about their music and the artists they're thankful for. The band Indigo Girls has shaped a generation of singer-songwriters.

Colin Pate was toiling away at his North Philadelphia recording studio in late June when he received an unbelievable text message: "Secret show at Johnny Brenda's tonight, 6:30."

"What you n***** know about the Dirty South?" When Cool Breeze and Goodie Mob posed that question in 1995, they weren't really looking for an answer from anybody in particular because obviously, they already knew it — not a gotdamn thing. The question came up just three months after André 3000 declared "the South's got something to say" as audience members booed after OutKast won the Best New Group trophy at the Source Awards.

The Go-Go's debut album, Beauty and the Beat, is universally regarded as an '80s pop and new wave classic. It's rightfully celebrated as the first album by an all-woman band who played its own instruments and wrote its own songs to top the Billboard 200 albums chart. But it was revolutionary in more than one way: It's also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s.

We have a winner! For the 2020 Tiny Desk Contest from NPR Music, our all-star team of judges reviewed more than 6,000 entries from across the U.S. and chose Linda Diaz, who submitted the song "Green Tea Ice Cream."

After 25 years of hosting shows from the Grand Ole Opry, Eddie Stubbs is retiring.

Eddie Stubbs came to Nashville in 1995 to play fiddle for Kitty Wells. But within a week, that voice got him a job at radio station WSM and just a few days after that, he was auditioning to host the Grand Ole Opry.

From that perch, he's seen one amazing performance after another and quite a bit of history — from the Opry debut of Carrie Underwood to witnessing the last performance of an icon like Grandpa Jones.

Updated on Aug. 6 at 8:06 a.m. ET

In April 1945, Madame Roos wrote a letter to French authorities describing her piano she was hoping to get back. Roos, who was 72, was Jewish and her piano had been stolen when Nazis emptied her apartment in Paris.

A similar fate befell many of the 75,000 French Jews deported to concentration camps during World War II.

A charity concert, headlined by The Chainsmokers, is prompting New York authorities to investigate after video showed an audience crowding closely in spite of the state's coronavirus rules.

Taylor Swift was supposed to spend this summer touring songs from Lover, the album she put out last August. Instead, like many of us, she wound up cooped up at home. The isolation seems to have sparked her creativity, leading her to write and record an entirely new record in collaboration with producers Jack Antonoff and The National's Aaron Dessner.

New Orleans trumpeter Shamarr Allen wanted to find a way to get guns out of kids' hands, so he turned to what he knows best: music. He recently created a gun-for-trumpet exchange program — called Trumpet Is My Weapon — and has so far collected four guns that he turned over to police.

"I had some trumpets lying around, and I know for me, the trumpet saved me," he says.

Allen, who's from the city's Lower Ninth Ward, started the program after learning about Devante Bryant, 9, was fatally shot in front of his 7th Ward home earlier this month.

Blues guitarist Peter Green, a co-founder of the band Fleetwood Mac, has died at the age of 73.

Representatives from the firm Swan Turton released a statement from Green's family on Saturday saying, "It is with great sadness that the family of Peter Green announce his death this weekend, peacefully in his sleep. A further statement will be provided in the coming days."

Annie Ross, the veteran jazz singer, actress and founding member of the historic vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, died on July 21, four days before her 90th birthday. According to her friend and former manager, Jim Coleman, Ross died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan. She had been suffering from emphysema and a heart condition.

An international collective of electronic music DJs and composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that samples the sounds of endangered birds and whose proceeds go directly towards efforts to save them.

Updated on July 20 at 1:47 p.m. ET.

The listening party has ended, but you can stream the album below via Spotify or Apple Music.

Think "Folkways Records" and what springs to mind is, well, folk. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, the New York label was conceived primarily as an audio library of American traditional music, but it also released a great number of ethnomusicological field recordings from around the world. The packaging of Folkways' albums reinforced this documentarian aura: sturdy cardboard sleeves, a somewhat frumpy design palette of earth tones, murky greens and somber purples, deeply educational liner notes.