David Dye

Husband and wife Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst had their own careers going — his with the band The Films and hers solo. Then they started performing together, just the two of them, and found that their personal chemistry translated to their music together.

The South Carolina duo released ...

Jesse Dee grew up in Boston — far from the South, where the music he loves has its roots — and could never quite shake the '50s and '60s R&B he'd heard on the radio as a kid. He started writing his own material in high school because he wanted ...

James Hunter fell in love with vintage R&B during his youth in England, with his grandmother's records providing a foundation. Hunter sang in workingman's clubs and got a break in the early '90s, when Van Morrison heard him singing and invited him on tour as a ...

The name Lady Lamb the Beekeeper came to singer-songwriter Aly Spaltro in a dream. When the Maine native emerged from the DVD-store basement where she'd been experimenting with music for several years, her friends responded positively. She soon moved to Brooklyn, where those original songs were re-worked for her debut ...

It's not as if Escondido members Jessica Maros and Tyler James didn't have enough going on already. Maros is a thriving fashion designer in Nashville, Tenn., known for dressing Lady Antebellum and others. James has been a member of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and recently had ...

At World Cafe, we recently asked Stephen Bowen of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville, Tenn., to name the five most important country records of all time. The store was founded by country pioneer Ernest Tubb, who had a hit with the early honky-tonk song "Walking the Floor Over ...

Jack White's Third Man Records has quickly become a cultural force in Nashville. The Third Man complex is situated in an industrial section of downtown, where it houses a retail store, the Third Man studio, a mail-order business and a music venue.

Every once in a while, a lucky ...

You might be tempted to call World Cafe's Sense of Place: Nashville guest Moon Taxi a jam band — that is, if its instrumental excursions weren't so concise, carefully thought-out and frequently refined in the years it's spent touring.

The quintet formed at Belmont University in Nashville and released its ...

A young darling of Nashville's music scene, Caitlin Rose just released her second album, The Stand-In. Rose moved to Nashville when she was 7, but resisted country music at first because her parents worked in the industry. Indie-rock was more her thing. Now she's doing a fantastic job of combining ...

In an attempt to discover the best new local music in Nashville, we headed to Grimey's Records, the mecca for indie music in town. It was opened by Mike Grimes in 1999, who also manages The Basement, the club in Grimey's basement. And the institution is still growing, recently opening ...

For World Cafe's Sense of Place: Nashville edition, we knew we wanted to talk with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings to get their take on changes in the city over the last couple of decades. The country-folk singer-songwriters moved to Nashville in 1993 and have worked ...

A young darling of Nashville's music scene, Caitlin Rose just released her second album, The Stand-In. Rose moved to Nashville when she was 7, but resisted country music at first because her parents worked in the industry. Indie-rock was more her thing; she first discovered Merle Haggard via ...

For our Sense of Place: Nashville week, we just had to showcase Luella and the Sun, which has made major fans out of Grimey's Records' Doyle Davis, other bands like Moon Taxi and NPR Music's Ann Powers.

The group brings together local veterans John Radford, Joe McMahan, Adam ...

Today's guest, Leagues, provides a perfect start to World Cafe's week-long visit to Nashville, because it perfectly encapsulates the change going on there. A new rock band, Leagues was formed by an amazing singer, Thad Cockrell, who'd been so disenchanted with his alt-country career that he was ready to leave ...

Today's Latin Roots co-host, Josh Norek, was given a hefty task: Define the broad swath of Argentine rock with just a few bands. But Norek, co-host of The Latin Alternative, is up to the occasion precisely because he spent time in Buenos Aires as a student during a vibrant period ...

Night Beds is the work of Winston Yellen, who originally started making music in his hometown of Colorado Springs. But he traveled to Nashville to write the songs for Night Beds' debut album, Country Sleep, in a pre-Civil War cabin once owned by Johnny Cash.

The ...

When Kail Baxley was a kid growing up in Williston, S.C., James Brown used to challenge him to dance-offs. Baxley didn't win so much. He did better as an amateur boxer — his key to getting out of the small town and traveling to Europe and Africa.

Baxley ...

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Every Friday throughout February, World Cafe gave away downloads of live performances from our recent sessions, featuring the likes of Lord Huron, Beach House, Afghan Whigs, Trey Anastasio and many more.

Here's the catch: They're only available TODAY, so download ...