(ThyBlackMan.com) When I think about the roots of blues music—the raw honesty, the pain wrapped in poetry, the joy carved out of hardship—I think of Ma Rainey. Her voice was more than a sound; it was ...

MassLive readers made their voices heard and we listened. There are numerous songs about Massachusetts out there in existence. Did we make a list containing every single song? No. But we found some ...

“When someone tells me they’re from Massachusetts/ Now I always ask, ‘What part?’” Jensen McRae sings in a song fragment she released on TikTok late last year. The singer-songwriter and poet soulfully ...

Yo-Yo Ma, one of the world’s most renowned and beloved musicians, is trying to provide comfort in this time of crisis. Ma has been posting videos of himself performing short pieces and encouraging ...

On a certain level, it makes sense that the piece of music for which the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma is best known also happens to be the very first song he learned how to play, at just four years old ...

When it comes to holiday music, we like what we like. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe we like a song because it’s a tune we played in high school band or sang every year in the holiday pageant. Maybe it’s ...

The pandemic has kept most of us holed up at home and seeking out the things in life that soothe us. For some, it's baking bread or getting a pet; for others it's taking a long walk. For world ...

Author Jedidiah Berry, who lives in Easthampton, recently won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction for his novel “The Naming Song.” “I was so pleased to see my book included among a list of so ...