For better or for worse, k.d. lang’s 1992 breakout album Ingénue will always be associated with her coming out. Throughout the late 1980s she had established herself as an unlikely country star, a traditionalist who sang like Patsy Cline and worked with Owen Bradley but whose short punk haircut and androgynous persona branded her as…

Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama, is one of the largest metaphors for race and class in the American South. Part of a range that cuts a diagonal southwest-northeast line through the state, it provided the ore that fed the region’s iron mills in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and more crucially it divided…

Who invented rock 'n' roll? Don’t answer that: It’s a trick question. Rock 'n' roll, like most complex sounds and genres and world-conquering forces, wasn’t actually invented. Instead, it germinated and mutated and mushroomed and erupted. It’s not the product of Elvis Presley or Sam Phillips, nor of Jackie Brenston or Louis Jordan. Rather, it…

“What’s the name of this song you’re going to sing?” says Herbert Halpert. The year was 1939, and the folklorist was visiting Elk Park, North Carolina, a small mountain community near the Tennessee border, not far from Johnson City. There, he met two singing sisters, Mrs. Lena Bare Turbyfill and Mrs. Lloyd Bare Hagie. “'Lily…

For the week of August 27, 1988, the number one song in America was George Michael’s “Monkey,” a crackling dance-pop tune off his multi-platinum Faith. Rounding out the top 10: Elton John’s “I Don’t Wanna Go On with You Like That” and Chicago’s “I Don’t Want to Live Without Your Love,” along with “Simply Irresistible”…