Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser talks about his new love letter to a passing heartland America.

Bob Dylan talked at length with historian Douglas Brinkley for Rolling Stone. We talk with Brinkley about Dylan and America now.

We hear the story of one writer’s magnificent obsession with the great American ballad, House of the Rising Sun.

Rock critic Amanda Petrusich and her long, strange trip into the roots of a new, authentically American, music.

Tunes from old Appalachia with a new bluegrass twist. A banjo, a fiddler, and a singer-guitarist from the hit folk band “Crooked Still” join us in our studio.

Southern-raised humorist Roy Blount Jr. took the midnight train out of Georgia a long time ago, to make a life well north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But you cannot take the South out of the Southern boy, and definitely not out of Blount’s lifetime of humorous essays and exasperation over America’s North-South incomprehension.
In a new collection, [...]

Americans’ impressions of the Amish tend to run hard and fast to stereotypes: wholesome horse-and-buggy barn-raisers or holier-than-thou cult of the past that cheats with chainsaws when you’re not looking.
The beards and bonnets and old-fashioned ways are endlessly alluring, and confusing. Is this the simple life that would save the planet if we all suited [...]

For a ballad of ruin and loss, there is none in the American songbook with more dark power than “House of the Rising Sun.” Everybody’s sung it. Everybody knows it.
The Animals made it a big hit in the 1960s, but its roots go way back. Alan Lomax first heard it from the lips of a [...]

Bill Geist grew up deep in the Midwest, went to work in New York, then turned his eye back on the nooks and crannies and marvels of the American back road.
For twenty years now, he’s trolled the country’s narrowest highways and byways for CBS, for great tales of small town America.
And he’s found some doosies. [...]

Sparky Rucker grew up black in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a family of preachers and policemen who fell in love with the blues and then all of American folk and the stories of American history.
Rhonda Hicks Rucker grew up white in Louisville, Kentucky, trained to be a doctor, then fell in love with the [...]

Novelist Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 2001’s “Empire Falls,” grew up in the kind of small, gritty town that he has written about for more than two decades. He knows the pride of blue-collar work, the shame of not having enough, and about the neighbors who live just a little too close.
In his [...]

It’s autumn — football season. And in towns across America, that means big games, halftime, and marching bands.
These days, in many towns and schools, the marching band can be as big a deal as the team. At the Rose Bowl and the Macy’s Parade, they dazzle. But they dazzle too on Friday nights, under the [...]