(Photo: lucindawilliams.com)

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Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams still remembers when she first hit the music scene in Nashville and LA and was told she was “too rock for country” and “too country for rock.”

Many albums later, the three-time Grammy winner is up for a fourth for her album “Little Honey.”

She’s found love, and a voice all her own. This hour, On Point: a conversation with alternative country-rocker, Lucinda Williams.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Lucinda Williams joins us from Burbank, California. Time Magazine has called her “America’s best songwriter.” Her latest CD, “Little Honey,” has been nominated for a Grammy Award for best Americana album.

When native Iowan turned Nebraskan Ted Kooser was named U.S. poet laureate in 2004, he was the first poet laureate named from the country’s Great Plains.

His poetry was described as modest, straightforward, stubborn, elegiac — and beautiful.

Now, Ted Kooser has written a big little book of elegy to the time and place and people who made him — who made a whole world of farm and field, gas station and pinochle game. A kind of love letter to the country’s heartland and his family’s place in it.

This hour, On Point: Ted Kooser, and a poet’s evocation of the past.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Ted Kooser joins us from Lincoln, Nebraska. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, he’s a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His new memoir is “Lights on a Ground of Darkness.” You can read an excerpt here (pdf). And you can read selections of his poems here, here, and here.

See Kooser read from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “Delights & Shadows” at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2005:

A Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan, almost 68 now, is America’s grand old man of … what? Folk? Rock? Touring honky tonk? Everything?

He’s out with his 33rd studio album, called “Together Through Life.” It’s #1 in the UK. He’s touring — a hundred gigs a year. And just lately, he’s been talking — not to a music critic, but to a bonafide historian, Douglas Brinkley.

Brinkley followed Dylan through Europe on his “never-ending tour.” His interviews became the cover story of this month’s Rolling Stone. Dylan talked about Texas, Elvis, patriotism, morality. About Duluth and Neil Young and Marcus Aurelius and Caravaggio.

This hour, On Point: Douglas Brinkley on Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone.

It’s been a long time since Blowin’ in the Wind. Since Blood on the Tracks. What does this man, this artist, this American mean to you? How do you see Bob Dylan? Tell us — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Douglas Brinkley joins us from Austin, Texas.  He’s a professor of history at Rice University and author of Rolling Stone’s current cover story, “Bob Dylan’s America” (not available online). He’s the editor of “Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954″ and two volumes of letters of his late friend Hunter S. Thompson, “The Proud Highway” and “Fear and Loathing in America” (a third and final volume is on the way). The author of many works of history and current affairs, on subjects from Hurricane Katrina to Henry Ford, he’s also profiled Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut for Rolling Stone.

More links:

David Fricke reviews “Together Through Life” in Rolling Stone.

Dylan’s own vast website has news about his tour, as well as a complete discography and an archive of song lyrics.

And in a different vein, On Point’s Wen Stephenson was moved by a moment in Brinkley’s piece where Dylan pays tribute to Neil Young (you can watch videos of Young and Dylan covering the other’s songs).

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 dirt-poor 16-year-old girl in Middlesboro, Kentucky in 1937. And she wasn’t the first to sing it.

This hour, in an archive edition of On Point: chasing the remarkable history of a remarkable song of ruin — House of the Rising Sun.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ted Anthony, author of the new book “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song.” He has worked for the Associated Press since 1992, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

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American roots music never stops feeding the tree of new American music, even when the branches grow wild.

Fast forward from the Carter Family’s mountain tunes and Robert Johnson’s Delta blues, shape note singing and early Elvis, and the next thing you know you’re listening to Animal Collective and Freakwater, Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine.

Music critic Amanda Petrusich went in search of new American music. She found it tangled in the roots.

This hour, On Point: The next American music.

You can join the conversation. What keeps the old sound — of mountain and delta — running through so much new American music?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From Charlottesville, Virginia, we’re joined by Amanda Petrusich, music critic for Pitchfork Media, Paste Magazine, and The New York Times. Her new book is “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.” Read an excerpt online at Pitchfork.

And from Marlboro, Vermont, is Robin MacArthur. She and her husband form the Vermont-based indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker.  You can hear songs at their Myspace page.

Songs featured in this hour:

“Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother!” Sufjan Stevens (2005)

“Mississippi Boweavil Blues” Charley Patton (1929)

“Southern Anthem” Iron & Wine (2002)

“Poor Orphan Child” The Carter Family (1927)

“Jack the Knife” Freakwater (2005)

“Black Metal Valentine” Califone (2006)

“I Wonder As I Wander” John Jacob Miles (1958)

“Who Could Win a Rabbit” Animal Collective (2004)

“Locks and Bolts” Margaret MacArthur (1995)

“Yellowbird” and “Jackknives” Red Heart the Ticker (2006, 2009)

“Sherburne” Alabama Sacred Harp Singers (1959)

“White Winter Hymnal” Fleet Foxes (2008)

Closing Segment: “Chinese Democracy”

Later in this hour, we also dip into the new Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy,” and the headlines it’s been making this week. Joining us for that is Brett Milano, a music critic and author of “The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock and Roll.”

Aoife O'Donovan and Gregory Liszt of "Crooked Still" in our studio

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When Crooked Still formed in 2001, it was a band of twenty-somethings from the Boston conservatory scene playing a genre-bending blend of bluegrass and folk. Critics raved about the sound of young Americans reinterpreting old Appalachian tunes.

Now, seven years later, with world tours under their belt and a recent overhaul of their lineup, they’re a little older, a little wiser — and every bit as innovative. Bluegrass and folk, pop and blues, maybe even jazz. They play mountain music from an old-time era, polished with percussive banjo-beats and an ethereal voice.

With us today we’ve got Crooked Still’s banjo player, their fiddler, and their singer-guitarist to put their sound in our ears.

This hour, On Point: breakout bluegrass innovators, Crooked Still.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Aoife O’Donovan, lead singer and founding member of Crooked Still.

Gregory Liszt, banjo player and founding member of Crooked Still. In 2006, he toured with Bruce Springsteen as a member of the Seeger Sessions Band.

Brittany Haas, fiddler for Crooked Still.

Links & Multimedia:

Crooked Still’s official website tells the band’s story and has all the information you could want on tour dates and recordings.

Double-bass player Corey DiMario’s blog, “Play the Bass, Drive the Bus,” has a big selection of videos from Crooked Still’s performances.

This is Crooked Still performing “Captain, Captain” (also heard in today’s show) from a recent show at the Basement in Nashville:

And here they are performing “Undone in Sorrow” at the Basement:

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, he’s hunting snakes, meeting Ray Charles, confronting his whiteness, considering the Rapture, and looking always for the nation’s overlap between North and South.

This hour On Point: Roy Blount Jr. on the North, South, and in-between.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Roy Blount, Jr., author of the new book “Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South.”

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 up? A culture of repression and illusion behind a pastoral front?

Writer Joe Mackall has lived long with Ohio’s Swartzentruber Amish, the world’s most conservative, and brings us the real story.

This hour On Point: an outsider among the Amish.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joe Mackall, author of “Plain Secrets: An outsider among the Amish,” director of the creative writing program at Ashland University in Ohio, and a former staff writer for the Washington Post.

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 dirt-poor 16-year-old girl in Middlesboro, Kentucky in 1937. And she wasn’t the first to sing it.

This hour, On Point: chasing the remarkable history of a remarkable song of ruin — House of the Rising Sun.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ted Anthony, author of the new book “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song.” He has worked for the Associated Press since 1992, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

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. Colorado gopher suckers. Illinois “moonburgers.” A standstill parade in Minnesota. The airborne mailman, the cow photographer, and, of course, the roadkill gourmet. This is fun.

This hour, On Point: off the road and deep in the grain with our small town man, Bill Geist.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Bill Geist, correspondent for CBS and author of “Way Off The Road.”

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 blues harmonica — and with Sparky.

Now they travel America’s highways and byways with a wagon-load of American history and legend and song. And when they perform, Americans gather round, and listen again.

This hour, On Point: Sparky and Rhonda Rucker sing America’s story.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Sparky and Rhonda Rucker: they perform throughout the U.S. and overseas, singing songs and telling stories from the American folk tradition.

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 new novel, “Bridge of Sighs,” Russo tells the story of those who stay in the small town of Thomaston, New York, where the river runs red with dye from the tannery, and the East End and West End kids don’t mix. And what happens when one leaves.

This hour, On Point: Richard Russo’s America.

-Jane Clayson

Guest:

Richard Russo, author of the new novel “Bridge of Sighs.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 novel “Empire Falls.” His other books include “Nobody’s Fool” and “Straight Man.”

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 lights, in towns you may never have heard of.

Kristen Laine marched for the Red Devils in Indiana as a high school girl. She’s gone back now, and gone deep, on the marching band of Elkhart, Indiana.

This hour, On Point: inside the booming culture of the American marching band.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kristen Laine, author of “American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland.”

Grant Longenbaugh, former solo trumpet in the Marching Minutemen for Concord Community High School in Elkhart, Indiana.

Eddie Ellis, South Carolina State University band director of The Marching 101.