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November 20, 2012 One of the great fantasies of the hippie era was that new combinations of music would emerge from the experimentation that was going on. Still, very few lived it. Ed Ward says The Insect Trust was one of the exceptions.

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October 22, 2012 Six feet tall, weighing in at 400 pounds and in his 40s when stardom hit him, Big Joe Turner is behind a load of rock 'n' roll hits. His hardest-hitting singles have been collected on a new compilation, titled Big Joe Turner Rocks.

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October 15, 2012 Ed Ward connects the dots of the British band's eight studio albums, which were just collected in a box set.

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October 1, 2012 Ed Ward reviews the reissued catalog from the multiracial, multi-generational ska band.

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September 10, 2012 Memphis has been a music town since anyone can remember, and it's had places to record that music since there have been records. Some of its studios — Sun, Stax and Hi — are well-known, but American Studios produced its share of hits, and yet remains obscure.

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September 6, 2012 Street Corner Symphonies is a 15-volume year-by-year survey of doo-wop by scholar Bill Dahl.

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August 16, 2012 There are lots of stories about the band that got away. For rock historian Ed Ward, one of those groups has always been Autosalvage, a New York quartet who made one album and then stopped playing.

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June 13, 2012 Charles was one of those rock 'n' roll figures whose work you're almost certainly familiar with, even if you've probably heard of him. He lived in isolation, recorded very little, didn't perform live and died in 2010. Rock historian Ed Ward looks at his memorable body of work.

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May 25, 2012 You've heard guitarist James Burton even if you don't know it. Ever since he was 15, he's been recording behind a bewildering number of artists, from Ricky Nelson to Ray Charles. He also managed to put out some records on his own. Rock historian Ed Ward shares his story.

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April 26, 2012 Sam Phillips once referred to Howlin' Wolf's voice as "where the soul of man never dies." Phillips, who worked with dozens of great Memphis musicians, never changed his mind. Rock historian Ed Ward examines the evolution of Wolf's singular talent.

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April 6, 2012 Mike McGonigal runs the literary magazine Yeti. In his spare time, he's been collecting gospel 45s on vanity and tiny independent labels for years. He's now released a pair of three-CD sets featuring amazing, long-forgotten African-American gospel tracks from his collection.

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February 3, 2012 One capital of soul in the 1960s? Muscle Shoals, Ala., a fly-speck on the map which spawned some of the era's greatest recordings, via productions in Rick Hall's Fame Studios. Rock historian Ed Ward has their story.

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January 25, 2012 The band didn't have many big hits, but it helped define the music of its generation. With the release of The Smiths' complete works, rock historian Ed Ward look back and tries to figure out what made the group so important.

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January 9, 2012 It's hard to believe today, but in the mid-1950s, Los Angeles didn't mean much in terms of popular music. But the coming of rock 'n' roll meant an infusion of tiny record labels — and one was Doré, run by a happy-go-lucky guy named Lew Bedell. Ed Ward tells its short, crazy story here.

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December 20, 2011 Before the Civil Rights movement, segregated American cities helped give birth to the Chitlin' Circuit, a touring revue that provided employment for hundreds of black musicians. Rock historian Ed Ward profiles two recent books which illuminate the conditions these musicians endured.

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