Arts

Listen On Friday morning, a Murfreesboro radio station will stop playing jazz and start playing a musical genre with deep roots but a short history.

Listen About 30 years ago, Tennessee folklorists began making a concerted effort to find overlooked artists and musicians. Those recordings have recently been digitized, and they include Emmanuel Dupree, an expert basket weaver and keeper of a rare musical style.

Listen Nashville writer TJ Jarrett is, by many objective measures, a successful artist. She’s won awards for her work and has published books of her poetry about history and race and family.  But as she tells WPLN’s Emily Siner in our live series and podcast Movers & Thinkers, it’s not easy getting to the point […]

Listen In terms of federal funding for the arts, Nashville organizations have received far more than other Tennessee cities — including twice as much as Memphis — in the past three years. That’s one of the insights from data provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which is […]

Listen Nashville is known for its “honkytonks” — the popular country music bars on Lower Broadway in downtown. The origin of the term is disputed — but a recently digitized interview with a Tennessee folk musician shows the impact that early honkytonks had on traditional music.

Listen You probably won’t find the work of Nashville artist Bryce McCloud in a museum. He purposely puts it in places that are more mundane: coffee shops, a record store, even a baseball stadium. McCloud talked to WPLN’s Emily Siner as part of our live series and podcast, Movers & Thinkers, about his desire to […]

Listen Long before Tennessee digitized a collection of traditional folk songs and storytelling, a small group of trained researchers had to collect those recordings in the field. That started in earnest in state parks in 1979.

Listen From ghost stories, to advice on how to build a banjo, to tales from the early days of electricity — all these subjects, along with traditional music, are captured in the Tennessee State Parks Folklife Collection.

Listen North Nashville has long been a center of artistic expression — from the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1860s to vast murals, painted in recent years, that span buildings and blocks. But organizers of the Jefferson Street Art Crawl are hoping to get more of the city paying attention to an often overlooked creative […]