Gwen Thompkins
Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans native, NPR veteran and host of WWNO's Music Inside Out, where she brings to bear the knowledge and experience she amassed as senior editor of Weekend Edition, an East Africa correspondent, the holder of Nieman and Watson Fellowships, and as a longtime student of music from around the world.
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Listen to a selection of marvelous music from the First Lady of Song, plus music by artists who have felt her influence. -
The Latin American Library at Tulane University is digitizing a whopping collection of Cold War-era, must-hear entertainment — Spanish language radionovelas made by Cuban emigrés in Miami.
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The rhythm-and-blues legend who became one of the progenitors of rock 'n' roll — and reportedly sold more than 65 million records along the way — died Tuesday.
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Fats Domino, a founding father of rock-and-roll, has died at age 89. His daughter said that he died Tuesday of natural causes.
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New Orleans lost much since Hurricane Katrina, and the failed levees that flooded the city. But Gwen Thompkins says the passions that survived the flood kept her city alive too.
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In the 1990s, Jim McCormick was teaching at the University of New Orleans and looking ahead to a future in academia. Today, he's one of the hottest lyricists in country music, having hit the top of the Billboard Country Music charts twice in the past six months.
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Any New Orleans piano player worth his fingers owes a debt to Henry Roeland Byrd, aka Professor Longhair. The late musician's home is still standing on Terpsichore Street, but it's in serious disrepair.
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A New Orleans socialite donated space in her family's mausoleum in the city's famous St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. Now, the final resting place of a white, aristocratic family is also the eternal home of black musical royalty: Ernie "Emperor of the Universe" K-Doe and Earl King.
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An upcoming documentary highlights the life of the man many called New Orleans' best pianist in a hundred years.
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Good food and company can overcome differences. Commentator Gwen Thompkins remarks on how one chat with someone who holds far different political beliefs can broaden minds and remind you of why you believe what you do.
