Jelly Roll Morton's 1938 concerts at the Library's Coolidge auditorium became a landmark jazz recording and the basis for his biography, "Mister Jelly Roll."
Lionel Richie smiled, the cameras flashed, the bass thumped, the music soared and the concert celebrating the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song popped back into life two years after COVID-19 shut down much of public life in the nation’s capital.
"The Metropolitan Opera Murders," the latest entry in the Library's Crime Classics series, is a novel from a woman who knows the score. Helen Traubel, a longtime star soprano who performed at the Met for years, wrote the book in 1951, shortly before she left the opera to pursue a career in popular entertainment.
Lionel Richie, the Alabama-born songwriter with a smooth voice and a deft touch for the romantic ballad, is the 2022 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song honoree.
The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center has found a never-before-seen home movie of the infamous Altamont Free Concert in 1969, during which a member of the Hell's Angels killed a member of the audience. The incident became a cultural turning point of the era.