“More than 16 million people tuned in to the Country Music Association’s 2011 awards show on ABC in November–the fourth most watched program of the week. Its success was predictable. Although rock albums outsell country albums by a wide margin, country outranks rock on Billboard‘s weekly “Hot 100″ chart of single record sales and the number of radio stations with all-country formats is roughly twice that of the stations that play rock. Yet the CMA awards no less predictably received scant attention from the mainstream media. Country is rarely written about in major newspapers and magazines and almost never seen or heard on network TV or in Hollywood films. Nor is its place in middlebrow culture other than marginal…”

“He is probably best known as an appendage to Katharine Hepburn, with whom he made nine movies and conducted a more-or-less open affair from 1941 to his death in 1967. Indeed, the Tracy-Hepburn romance is the only thing that the average under-50 moviegoer knows about the man whom John Ford called ‘the best actor we ever had…'”

“In 1966, NBC broadcast a Bell Telephone Hour program about George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra called ‘One Man’s Triumph.’ Nowadays, most viewers would find it presumptuous for that phrase to be used as the title of a TV documentary about a hundred-man ensemble whose members included some of America’s top instrumentalists. But no one would have thought to complain at the time–for Szell was universally believed to be solely responsible for the transformation of a merely regional group into a virtuoso ensemble…”

“Bennett was by no means the only pop musician of his generation to be thrown off balance by the coming of rock. But instead of retreating into dignified obscurity, he stopped using drugs, resumed his recording career, and made the kind of comeback that is the stuff of Hollywood biopics. Today his fans include listeners whose parents had not yet been born when he cut his first single in 1950. Amazingly, he brought off this feat without altering or compromising his style in any way. At 85, Bennett continues to sing the songs of the Twenties and Thirties the way he did in the Fifties and Sixties. All that has changed is his audience…”

“Most major labels no longer think Broadway shows are worth bothering with, even though the original-cast album was not only a mainstay of the record business for decades but one of the keys to popularizing the LP in the first place…”

“Like all genuine artists, Kushner writes not as he should but as he must, and his diffuse discursiveness is undoubtedly in part a function of his temperament. Still, the success of Angels in America seems to have confirmed Kushner in the belief that the iron law of economy that governs traditional theatrical storytelling does not apply to him…”

“The unusual and tragic career of Leon Fleisher has always been one of the great classical-music mysteries of the age. Widely regarded in the 1950s and 1960s as this country’s finest native-born classical pianist, Fleisher stopped appearing in concerts in 1965 when a then-inexplicable nervous-system disorder left him unable to play with his right hand…”

“Few cinematic cameos have been more galvanizing than Cab Calloway’s in The Blues Brothers. In the 1980 film, he plays a janitor who suddenly dons white tie and tails, gets up on stage in front of an admiring group of long-haired rock and soul musicians, and proceeds to steal the show not only from its stars, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, but also from James Brown, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, all of whom made cameo appearances of their own. How? By singing ‘Minnie the Moocher,’ a swinging lament for an opium addict he had written a half-century earlier…”