Rock 'n Roll

Richard Levick | Winter 2023

The late Michael Nesmith, cerebral member of The Monkees, embodied youth unrepressed.

Kent Hartman | February/March 2007

. . . and high time they got some credit for these classics

February/March 2007

Although the Wrecking Crew is widely considered the most prominent group of pop/rock studio musicians to come out of their day, other cities and other music styles had their own important session players.

The Wrecking Crew

Kent Hartman | February/March 2007

Was Hal Blaine one of your favorite musicians back in the 1960s? How about Larry Knechtel? Carol Kaye? Oh, yes, they were.

1964 - The Year At A Glance

October 2006

January 11 Surgeon General Luther L. Terry releases his report on cigarette smoking. January 16 Hello, Dolly! opens at the St. James Theater in New York City.

1964 - The Year the 60s Began

Joshua Zeitz | October 2006

Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year

More Mr. Nice Guy

Karen Schoemer | February/March 2006

How Pat Boone seduced this rock critic

Pat Boone Says: You Don’t Have to Wiggle

Pat’s Progress: A Boone Timeline

Jillian Sim | February/March 2006

June 1, 1934 A direct descendant of the frontiersman Daniel Boone, Charles Eugene Patrick “Pat” Boone is born, to a building contractor and a registered nurse, in Jacksonville, Florida.

Seeking the Greatest Bluesman

Samuel Charters | July/August 1991

Robert Johnson died in obscurity in 1938. Since then, he has gradually gained recognition as a genius of American music. Only recently have the facts of his short, tragic life become known.

Who was Robert Johnson? For so many years, that question haunted all of us who loved the blues. Certainly, we knew about Robert Johnson’s music.

Subscribe to Rock 'n Roll

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.