The first of many acts to cement the college town of Athens, GA as a hotbed of alternative music, the B-52's took their name from the Southern slang for the mile-high bouffant wigs sported by singers Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, a look emblematic of the band's campy, thrift-store aesthetic. Rounded out with spoken word lyrics from founding member Fred Schneider, the B-52’s have branded themselves over the decades as the ultimate upbeat party band, with highly danceable tracks. The year 2008 found the band returning with a new album for the first time in 16 years: Funplex, released by Astralwerks.

Click to view video clip

Mavis Staples: Rhythm, blues and gospel queen Mavis Staples began her career touring and recording gospel tunes with her family as The Staple Singers. With Mavis' voice, the Staples evolved from popular gospel singers to the most spectacular and influential spiritually-based group in America. By the mid-1960's The Staple Singers, inspired by their close friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., became the spiritual and musical voices of the civil rights movement. The Staples signed to Stax Records in 1968, joining their gospel harmonies and deep faith with pop musical accompaniment, taking their singles to the Top 40 eight times between 1971 and 1975, including two #1 singles, I'll Take You There and Let's Do It Again. Now a bona fide pop star, Mavis Staples still channels her soulful, gospel roots to inspire change and optimism through her lyrics and musical styling.

Click to view video clip

Allen Toussaint: Singer, pianist, songwriter, arranger and producer, New Orleans native Allen Toussaint has been making hit records for over forty years. His massive influence on American music reaches deep into the idioms of rhythm and blues, pop, country, musical theater, blues and jazz. Toussaint now runs his own record label, NYNO, and enjoys a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where he was inducted in 1998.

Click to view video clip

With the “Three Girls and Their Buddy” tour, seminal singer-songwriters Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, and Buddy Miller share the stage to trade music and stories spanning decades of performing experience and musical history. With dozens of albums and Grammy awards between them, these rock and folk fixtures join together to explore the intimate relationships among their musical genres and styles.

Click to view video clip

Ladysmith Black Mambazo represents the traditional culture of South Africa and is regarded as the country's cultural emissary at home and around the world. A radio broadcast in 1970 brought about their first record contract. Since then the group has recorded over forty albums, selling over seven million records at home and abroad, establishing themselves as the number one selling group from Africa. Their work with Paul Simon on the Graceland album attracted a world of fans that never knew that the sounds of Zulu harmony could be so captivating.

Click to view video clip

Since they began as Los Lobos Del Este Los Angeles in 1973, Los Lobos have evolved into a respected artistic entity searching for themes and topics that are an interpretive pulse of our times. Using musical molds built on the blues, rockabilly, jazz, Latin and their own Mexican-American heritage, Los Lobos have never beat their fans over the head with politics or agendas. Instead, they subtly challenge them with conscience-raising songs and thought-provoking lyrics. Their latest Hollywood Records release—The Town and The City—certainly does that with each song serving as an episodic step in a rough journey that is in your face at times, comforting and nostalgic at others.

Click to view video clip

Cowboy Junkies: Although it didn't originally have anything to do with their sound, the Cowboy Junkies' name wound up seeming pretty accurate: their music was grounded in traditional country, blues, and folk, yet drifted along in a sleepy, narcotic haze that clearly bore the stamp of the Velvet Underground. The vast majority of their songs were spare and quiet, taken at lethargic tempos and filled with languid guitars and detached, ethereal vocals courtesy of Margo Timmins. Over the late '80s and '90s, the group recorded a succession of critically acclaimed albums that found favor in the alternative rock community. Their latest limited edition output—Acoustic Junk —taps into the band’s essential sound by stripping down the music to its core.

Click to view video clip

Son Volt: With an alternative country sound, Son Volt, featuring St. Louis-based artist Jay Farrar, spans the great country traditions of America—from salt-of-the-earth ballads to soaring barroom rock. Son Volt’s latest album, The Search, takes Farrar’s signature juxtapositions of the arcane and the modern to provocative extremes, contrasting the blue highways of a disappearing cultural landscape with a perilous world in which the center no longer holds.

Click to view video clip

Devoted environmental and social justice activists and lifelong music-industry mavericks, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, known as the Indigo Girls, have spent over two decades pushing musical and social boundaries. Their 2009 release, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, is an exercise in duality—featuring a double-disc set that presents an album and its acoustic version, challenging listeners to reconcile two perspectives of the same songs. Poseidon and the Bitter Bug represents the duos first album from their own label, IG Recordings.

Three-time Grammy® nominee, hailed by the New York Times as a “songwriter bursting with talents,” singer-songwriter Jewel has enjoyed career longevity rare among her generation of artists. Whether alone with her guitar or fronting a band of ace musicians, Jewel has always been a charismatic live performer, but has also seen success as an actress, poet, painter and philanthropist. Jewel’s latest acoustic album, Lullaby, reinvents the sweet melodies of lullabies with Jewel’s signature voice taking on standards as well as self-penned tracks.

Click to view video clip

Joan Baez remains a musical force of nature whose influence is incalculable. Her earliest recordings fed a host of traditional ballads into the rock vernacular, before she unselfconsciously introduced Bob Dylan to the world in 1963 and focused awareness on songwriters ranging from Woody Guthrie to Kris Kristofferson and Dar Williams. If ever a new collection of songs reflects the momentous times in which Joan finds herself these days, and in her own words, "speaks to the essence of who I am in the same way as the songs that have been the enduring backbone of my repertoire for the past 50 years," Day After Tomorrow is that record, her latest studio album featuring themes of hope and homecoming.

Click to view video clip

Whether performing her own poetically evocative material or the compositions of her influences, friends, and peers, Nanci Griffith possesses a powerful gift for inhabiting the songs she sings, for communicating unspoken intimacy and heartache through her tender voice and lilting, delicate phrasing. At the outset of a career that has now spanned nearly three decades, Griffith first emerged as a writer of startling depth and subtlety, crafting sparse uncluttered vignettes that revealed a wealth of emotion in even the most humble of characters and settings. With her gifts as a songwriter lending invaluable insight, Griffith has also grown into a formidable interpreter of other people's songs, as demonstrated on such albums as the Grammy® Award-winning Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Click to view video clip

Susan Tedeschi: Since bursting onto the scene a decade ago, singer-songwriter Susan Tedeschi has explored a broad musical and emotional palette, showcasing Tedeschi’s multiple talents as a deeply expressive singer, a soulful and melodic guitarist and a distinctive, evolving songwriter. Her knack for musical truth-telling has been apparent in the years since she first captured the public’s musical imagination with an impressive musical and commercial breakthrough with 1998’s indie release Just Won’t Burn. The album became a massive grassroots success. Just Won’t Burn achieved Gold sales status and won Tedeschi a Grammy® nomination for Best New Artist. Following up her 2005 Grammy® nominated album Hope and Desire, Tedeschi released Back to the River in 2008.

Click to view video clip

JJ Grey & Mofro: Like Florida’s state flower, the orange blossom, musician JJ Grey’s songs are fascinating, beautiful, and complex. Born and raised just outside of Jacksonville, Florida, Grey comes from a long tradition of Southern musical storytellers and, like the best of the great Southern writers, he fills his songs with details that are at once vivid and personal, political and universal. His multi-textured music overflows with dynamic rhythms and thought-provoking lyrics. From raw funk to deep soul, blues and rock, JJ and his band Mofro deliver devastating live and recorded performances.

Click to view video clip

Inspired by soul greats, Amos Lee directs his music with a spirit and presence rooted in American tradition. Amos delivers a unique brand of folk-soul music that aims to unite, uplift and inspire. The “folk” side is reflected in his nimble acoustic guitar playing and the intimacy of his live performances. The “soul” strain comes through in the engaging song-poetry of his lyrics. Lee released his third studio album, Last Days at the Lodge, in 2008.

Click to view video clip