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      Grammy Surprises: boygenius Thrives, Country and Rap Wither

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      A look at the Grammys’ most unexpected and interesting story lines, including Olivia Rodrigo’s intergenerational rock battle with the Rolling Stones.Young women from across genres — along with the Recording Academy’s favorite polymath spoiler Jon Batiste — reigned atop the nominations on Friday for the 66th annual Grammy Awards, to be held Feb. 4 in Los Angeles.But beyond familiar names like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, this year’s class of nominees reveals a strong surge for R&B (SZA, Victoria Monét, Coco Jones, Janelle Monáe); a tough showing for country, rap and Latin music, especially in the top categories; and the enduring love for soundtracks historically felt in Grammyland.But who got left out, who represents a welcome surprise and what, as ever, are the Grammys thinking? The New York Times’s pop music team — editor Caryn Ganz, reporter Joe Coscarelli, chief pop music critic Jon Pareles and pop music critic Jon Caramanica — pored over the complete list, including some deeper, oft-ignored categories, to break down the most interesting story lines, snubs and surprises.Boygenius makes the big leagues.The indie-rock supergroup made up of the singers and songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus was once a side project, an inside joke, a fun way to promote a tour of solo acts. Not anymore. Having released its debut album, “The Record,” earlier this year on the major label Interscope — and having sold 67,000 albums in its first week, landing in the Billboard Top 5 — boygenius may very well be the biggest new rock band working, with all the arena shows, promotional savvy and celebrity worship that entails. Recognized in best rock performance, best rock song, best alternative performance, best alternative album, best engineered album and — most notably — album of the year, boygenius is among the most nominated acts with six overall, the same number as Taylor Swift. Not bad company in 2023. JOE COSCARELLIWhere’s country music?By any measure, it has been a banner 12 months for country music on the pop charts — Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200, and in August, for the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the top three positions were occupied by country songs. And yet none of the artists behind those songs — Wallen, Luke Combs and Jason Aldean — were nominated in any of the Grammys’ big three all-genre categories. Neither was Zach Bryan, the genre’s leading dissident, nor Oliver Anthony, who had the year’s most unlikely No. 1 hit.The shutout of the men of country may be indicative of the political shift, explicit and implicit, shaping the genre’s most prominent figures. Wallen, who remains under the long shadow of the 2021 revelation that he was captured on tape using a racial epithet, is still the most popular performer in the genre; he received no nominations this year (though his song “Last Night” is up for best country song, a prize for songwriters). With Aldean, the politics are more literal. His vigilante-justice hit, “Try That in a Small Town,” made overt a partisan perspective that often resides just beneath the surface in Nashville. As for Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a workingman lament that baffled both the left and the right, its direct engagement with class politics perhaps made it too hot to the touch for Grammy voters (if, indeed, Anthony even submitted it for consideration).If there were one song with the best chance of bridging contemporary country to the Grammys, it would be Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which went to No. 2 on the Hot 100 and earlier this week won song of the year at the CMA Awards, making Chapman the first Black winner in that category. But in part because of Grammy rules — it isn’t eligible for song of the year because Chapman was nominated for her original in 1989 — Combs’s version has been relegated to just a single nomination, in best country solo performance, a snub that feels unexpectedly pointed. JON CARAMANICA‘Barbie’ at the Grammys? Yes, she Ken.If it felt this year that pop music was more slippery than ever, subject to the whims of streaming algorithms and TikTok trends, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Grammys chose to reward songs that came via a particularly old-fashioned delivery mechanism: the film soundtrack.Songs from the Greta Gerwig film “Barbie” — a canny collection of contemporary pop hitmakers finding creative ways to wrestle with the film’s themes — are everywhere in this year’s nominations. Billie Eilish’s familiarly melancholy “What Was I Made For?” is up for record and song of the year, and Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” is also nominated for song of the year. “Barbie World” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice will compete for best rap song. Tracks from the soundtrack also hog up four of the five available slots in best song written for visual media. CARAMANICAEmerging Latin stars get left behind.After a year in which Latin music continued to explode on streaming services and forge all sorts of cross-cultural hybrids, this year’s Grammy nominations are, well, puzzling. Edgar Barrera, the Mexican American songwriter who has collaborated on hit after hit for singers across the Americas, is rightfully a nominee for songwriter of the year. But there’s no best new artist nomination for Peso Pluma, the cutting-voiced Mexican songwriter whose career skyrocketed in 2022 and 2023 — he’s touring arenas this year — and who bridges regional Mexican corridos and Latin trap. Peso Pluma’s 2023 album, “Génesis,” is just tucked among the nominees for música mexicana. Other emerging Mexican-rooted acts that had a blockbuster year — among them Eslabon Armado, Grupo Frontera, Grupo Firme, Christian Nodal and Natanael Cano — go unmentioned.Then there’s the oddity of the música urbana category. Its three — only three — nominees are deserving: the reggaeton producer Tainy, the electronics-loving pop experimenter Rauw Alejandro and the Colombian songwriter Karol G, whose 2023 album, “Mañana Será Bonito,” was the first Spanish-language album by a woman to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. But música urbana — encompassing reggaeton, Latin hip-hop, dembow, Latin trap and more — is a crowded, competitive, hugely popular format. The Grammys couldn’t find five nominees? All they had to do was turn on the radio. JON PARELESOlivia Rodrigo takes on … the Rolling Stones.The Grammys’ rock categories are reliable head-scratchers, but best rock song provides an unexpected delight this time: Olivia Rodrigo’s “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” goes up against the Rolling Stones’ “Angry,” pitting some of this year’s oldest nominees (average Stones age: 78) against one of the youngest (at 20, Rodrigo is still not old enough to order a celebratory champagne). Rodrigo is the only nominee in the category who isn’t part of a band, but her track has the fewest number of writers: just two, herself and the producer Daniel Nigro. (The other competitors include boygenius, Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.)“Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” with its gleeful pop-punk thrash, is an ode to social awkwardness that draws on ’90s rockers like Veruca Salt; “Angry” is built on a classic Stones riff with plenty of room to breathe — unlike the troubled relationship Mick Jagger describes in its lyrics. Both describe uncomfortable situations; both sound like a load of fun. And it’s nice to see Rodrigo’s latest album, “Guts,” recognized in the rock field, where it belongs. CARYN GANZA powerful Paul Simon LP goes unrewarded.If anyone should have been able to count on respect from the Grammys, it’s Paul Simon. His 2023 album, “Seven Psalms,” plays as a thoughtful, complex, tuneful farewell, anticipating his death. It’s a major statement couched in intimate acoustic arrangements, with the craftsmanship and artistic ambition that awards shows claim to recognize. Simon has won 16 Grammys, dating back to his days with Simon and Garfunkel. But “Seven Psalms” was shut out of high-profile categories like album of the year, and got just one obscure nomination, for best folk album, where Simon competes with the touching comeback (and beloved, familiar songs) of “Joni Mitchell at Newport.” The Grammys used to reward late-career albums by musicians like Steely Dan (“Two Against Nature”), Bob Dylan (“Time Out of Mind”) and Tony Bennett (“MTV Unplugged”). Now, Simon’s knotty confrontation with mortality seems to have gotten stranded between Grammy generations. PARELESRap’s Grammy struggle continues.For the 20th time in a row, a rap release will not win album of the year at the Grammys. That was a safe bet before — only two hip-hop albums have ever won in the biggest category: Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999 and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004 — but it’s assured now because none were even nominated. No rap appears among the nominees in record or song of the year, either. (Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” remains the only rap song to ever win in those categories.) But while past Grammys have brought recriminations about how hip-hop is recognized, this shutout up top comes amid a year of intra-genre soul-searching about a lack of chart impact and a dearth of new stars, especially those invested in the album format.The genre-specific nominations include a mix of familiar names (Drake — despite his history of boycotting submissions — with 21 Savage, plus Nicki Minaj and Nas) and a few artists with something to prove (Killer Mike, Doja Cat, Coi Leray). Yet this may be the first year in some time where a lack of major recognition is met with a resigned sigh. Outside of SZA’s rap-flavored singing, Ice Spice’s nomination for best new artist is the lone bright spot in the biggest categories, driving home another common talking point in rap industry circles of late: Women are the present, and likely the future. COSCARELLIGreetings from traditional pop.Oh, the categories! Who knew that Bruce Springsteen, a lifelong rocker, would someday find himself among the “traditional pop vocal” nominees? I think of it as the slot that was created for singers, like Tony Bennett, who kept reaching back to what was known as the Great American Songbook: pop standards written for vintage Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the sophisticated idiom that was overturned by the simplicity of rock ’n’ roll. But Springsteen’s nominated album, “Only the Strong Survive,” isn’t a standards album. It’s a collection of vintage 1960s soul songs, which somehow do not qualify in the Grammy category of “traditional R&B.” Are the Grammys expanding the Great American Songbook, or just consigning Springsteen to the past? PARELES More

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      Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre

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      TRAY WELLINGTON KNOWS that many will take the title of his 2022 album, “Black Banjo,” as an oxymoron. The banjo, and with it an entire body of folk-based music, is now so thoroughly associated with whiteness as to obscure its origins in Black musical tradition. “One of the first things I heard when I started playing banjo was, ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this,’” says Wellington, 24, whose father is Black and mother is white. But for him, playing the banjo has become an act of reclamation.Contemporary audiences still tend to associate the banjo with white Southern traditions of bluegrass, old-time and what record labels used to market as hillbilly music, but its roots are in Africa, in stringed instruments like the akonting, the buchundu and the ngoni. During the 19th century, the banjo became inextricably linked to minstrelsy: variety shows in which white performers (and, increasingly after the Civil War, Black performers) “blacked up,” grotesquely caricaturing Black facial features. The minstrel show, which persisted onstage and onscreen well into the 20th century, accounts for the banjo’s conflicted legacy — both part of the visual vocabulary of white supremacy and a point of creative contact between Black and white musicians.Wellington’s interest in the banjo was stoked by his maternal grandfather’s love of classic country, which he’d play for Wellington on fishing trips or while working in the backyard garden of the family home in Ashe County, N.C. After some cajoling, Wellington’s mother (a hip-hop fan) took her 13-year-old son to a pawnshop, where they purchased one on layaway. Playing banjo eventually led Wellington to East Tennessee State University’s renowned Bluegrass, Old‑Time and Roots Music program, where he learned the history and practice of folk music and joined a community of mostly white teachers and students. Many of his classmates welcomed him (he plays with fellow E.T.S.U. grads in his current band); a few subjected him to scorn. “People would often ask me, ‘How does it feel to be Black in this music?’ I would put if off because I didn’t want to talk about it,” Wellington says. Recording “Black Banjo” during the pandemic lockdown and amid protests for racial justice, however, occasioned an awakening. Being a Black banjo player is “kind of a rare thing,” he says. “It’s who I am.”The folk musicians Dom Flemons, Kara Jackson, Amythyst Kiah and Tray Wellington discuss the complications of being a Black performer working in a genre now commonly associated with whiteness.Justin FrenchToday Black folk performers have reached a critical mass and level of exposure not seen since the early decades of the 20th century, when Black bands like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band were among the most commercially popular in the country, touring in medicine shows and playing vaudeville stages. In a 2013 essay about Gus Cannon, the banjo-playing frontman of the Jug Stompers, the multi-instrumentalist and cultural historian Dom Flemons writes that it was only out of an “absurd racial insensitivity” that a “legitimate Black art form developed.” Flemons, 41, who goes by the name the American Songster in tribute to the players of the past, believes we’ve now entered “a postmodern contemporary folk period” in which new and more expansive definitions of traditional music are taking root. He’s among a new generation of Black folk musicians that includes Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and many others who are returning to songs that are decades (even centuries) old. They play fiddles and jugs, bones and guitar — and most of all the banjo.Some of these performers veer into activism. For Hannah Mayree, 34, a Northern California-based musician, “playing banjo as a Black person is not enough.” That’s why she founded the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, which supplies instruments to Black musicians and holds workshops where participants learn to make banjos for themselves. “The knowledge of how to build a banjo lives inside my body,” she says. Other musicians are folklorists, introducing listeners to source recordings that testify to an unbroken tradition of Black folk music in America. Still others see reclaiming the past as a means of creating a future. “As opposed to someone who is the caretaker of an archive, I think of my role as a living musician as a member of a future archive,” says Jake Blount, 28, a banjo and fiddle player from Washington, D.C. His most recent album, “The New Faith” (2022), presents an Afrofuturist refiguring of traditional songs. Black Americans, Blount says, have “had to be a forward-facing people because the past has been denied to us.” Part of that history is recoverable through sheet music and source recordings, but much is lost to memory.IN THE BROADEST sense, folk music is a multiracial, working-class tradition, stretching across time and continents. In the United States alone, it comprises a repertoire of ballads and work songs, blues and breakdowns, songs of love and songs of protest. Folk is a body of simple tunes played by beginners — “Tom Dooley,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Down in the Valley” — and a platform for the greatest virtuosity. For some the term conjures a cinematic shorthand: the dueling banjos of “Deliverance” (1972) and George Clooney mugging his way through “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (2000). Folk’s history over the past century or more is best told through revivals, periods of intensified interest and participation in the music. In moments when the notion of a shared cultural heritage is most desirable — during the Great Depression, or the Red Scare paranoia of the ’40s and ’50s — people have often returned to what the 20th-century folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan once described as “the big song bag which the folk have held in common for centuries.” During a 1956 live performance of the spiritual “This Train (Bound for Glory)” — a song that’s now been recorded by scores of artists, including Louis Armstrong, Alice Coltrane, Bob Marley and Sister Rosetta Tharpe — the guitar legend Big Bill Broonzy teased an audience of earnest college students swept up in the latest revival. “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said while noodling on his guitar, with the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger playing banjo onstage beside him. “Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!”Rhiannon Giddens at Cecil Sharp House, an arts center in London named for the English folklorist.Justin FrenchFolk is indeed the people’s music, yet early efforts to market it ended up, to borrow the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s phrase, segregating sound. In the 1920s, with the advent of the modern recording industry and broadcast radio, music executives, most notably Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, leveraged emergent technology to define marketable genre categories along racial lines. Out of this came so-called race records (which first appeared at the beginning of the 1920s, aimed at Black Americans) and hillbilly records (which arrived a few years later, geared toward Southern whites). Even as folk crossed racial boundaries — as in the Lomaxes’ recordings of Lead Belly for the Library of Congress — white song hunters often constrained Black performers inside narrow presumptions: attributing virtuosity to natural gifts rather than to musical skill; soliciting songs of protest and lament rather than those of love and happiness; and conjuring a mythic authenticity instead of making space for the real thing (as happened when the Lomaxes, after helping to secure Lead Belly’s release from Angola prison in 1934 in Louisiana, made him perform thereafter in a prison jumpsuit).Over the decades, race records gave way to more coded genre designations, like R&B and soul. Hillbilly morphed into country and western and finally simply into country. By midcentury, folk was widely considered a genre, too, a narrow term to define acoustic, string-based music, mostly by white musicians and often with a political bent. Folk songs inspired generations of singer-songwriters like Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, whose global fame the term “folk” was too small to contain. Folk, at least for some, became a backward glance to a distant past, nostalgic and reverential. It became Southern and working class and, in the minds of many, it became white.Amythyst Kiah in front of her father’s home in Johnson City, Tenn.Justin FrenchTHE RENAISSANCE OF Black folk music can be traced back to a single event nearly 20 years ago. In April 2005 in Boone, N.C., some 30 Black string-band musicians and dozens of other attendees came together for fellowship. Black Banjo Then and Now, as the gathering was called, began as an online community of over 200 members (only a small percentage of whom were Black), formed the year before by Tony Thomas, a Black banjo player from Miami. Among the group’s most junior members were Flemons, an Arizona native, then 23, and the then-27-year-old Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained soprano from Greensboro, N.C. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in music performance, Giddens found her way back home, working two jobs — one as a singing hostess at Romano’s Macaroni Grill — until she earned enough money to buy her instruments, and calling contra dances, a form of line-based group folk dancing with roots in the British Isles.Giddens sought a way to embrace her love of folk music and her Blackness, too. It’s a central paradox of folk today: How can a music so thoroughly identified with whiteness that, for the better part of 50 years, found definition in contradistinction to Black music and even Black people be so Black? She found her answer at the in-person gathering of Black Banjo Then and Now. At the time, she told the Greensboro News & Record that old-time was “something that really spoke to me, and it was OK that the people who were playing it were white. But when I discovered my people had so much to do with the music, and the string bands at the turn of the century were Black, well, this is a part of history.” The four-day event, held on the campus of Appalachian State University, drew musicians from afar, including the New York-based old-time string band the Ebony Hillbillies, and living legends from close to home, like the then-86-year-old North Carolina old-time fiddle virtuoso Joe Thompson. The experience was unforgettable, with epic jam sessions and intergenerational camaraderie. “It changed my life,” Giddens says. Out of this gathering, she, along with Flemons and, eventually, a third member, Justin Robinson, formed a modern Black string band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops.The Chocolate Drops were both interested in history and utterly contemporary. All members sang and played multiple instruments, with the banjo at the center of their sound. Their style of performance owes a debt to Thompson (who died in 2012). “We had a pure mission to expose this music to as many people as possible and to tell Joe’s story,” Giddens says. On their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” which won a Grammy Award for best traditional folk album, they covered the 2001 R&B song “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell, taking a time-bound pop hit and making it feel nearly as timeless as “This Train.” The group disbanded in 2014, at which point, as Giddens says, the project had done “exactly what it was meant to do: inspire a whole generation of young people of color to say, ‘Hey, I see myself.’”Tray Wellington with his banjo at the Pour House, a music venue and record store in Raleigh, N.C.Justin FrenchTHE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It’s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri Baraka once defined Black music as “American music expanded past the experience of the average American.” “It gets down,” he wrote. “It is about the life of the downed, yet its dignity is in the fantastic sophistication even at the moment of would-be, should-be humiliation and actual despair.” Giddens, who once described her music as “Black non-Black music” and now prefers to call it simply “American music,” understands this implicitly. “All the good things that come from American music [come from] mixture,” she says. “Hiding in plain sight in all the different types of American music is cross-cultural working-class collaboration. It’s people making music because that’s what they’ve got.”The most powerful folk music has always addressed points of tension: between Black and white, rich and poor, sophistication and humiliation. Cannon’s 1927 song “Can You Blame the Colored Man?” tells the story of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901, the year Washington’s best-selling autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was published. “Could you blame the colored man for makin’ them goo-goo eyes?” Cannon sings, after describing in detail the lavish dinner at the president’s table. Likewise, today’s best folk music still confronts issues of race and class. In 2019 Amythyst Kiah, now 36, a guitarist and banjo player from Tennessee, joined Giddens, along with Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, in a string-band collective called Our Native Daughters. They decided to excavate American history, going back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to find inspiration for new songs. One of the songs that came of that process was the startling and soulful “Black Myself.”I don’t pass the test of the paper bag’Cause I’m Black myselfI pick the banjo up and they sneer at me’Cause I’m Black myselfYou better lock your doors when I walk by’Cause I’m Black myselfYou look me in my eyes but you don’t see me’Cause I’m Black myselfThe brown paper bag test, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, was born out of colorism within the Black community, in nightclubs and house parties in New Orleans where anyone darker than the bag taped to the door would be denied entrance. In a song that confronts the experience of being shut out of traditionally white spaces — such as contemporary folk and country music — Kiah’s lyrics build toward resistance and joy: “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face / ’Cause I’m Black myself.”Addressing her race so explicitly in her music was a departure for Kiah. “I’ve always written songs in a way where anybody can put themselves in that position,” she says. Throughout her years of playing, she’s subscribed to the theory that the more specific and personal a song’s perspective, the more a listener — any listener — will relate to it. Just as Kiah, no poor white Southern girl from rural Kentucky, could relate to Loretta Lynn’s 1970 single “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she says, so she hopes that listeners, whomever they may be, will relate to “Black Myself.”Bluegrass and country, the music first marketed a century ago as hillbilly, might seem inhospitable to Black listeners and musicians. But there’s a longstanding tradition that binds Black people, both personally and aesthetically, to these sounds. “The way I talk is with an accent, so the way I sing is with an accent. And that has always needed to be explained because I’m in the skin I’m in,” says Valerie June, 41, whose voice carries the cadences of her native Jackson, Tenn. “There are [Black] people from where I’m from that talk like me. And if they started singing, they would probably sound like me.”Flemons at FitzGerald’s.Justin FrenchThis rootedness in place, particularly a rural Southern place where many Black Americans no longer live but that they never left behind, is central to Black folk music’s endurance. When Kara Jackson was a child, during the first decades of the 2000s, in Oak Park, Ill., just outside of Chicago, characters from her father’s hometown of Dawson, Ga., populated her imagination. “I grew up knowing these nicknames, hearing these stories from this small Southern town of 4,000 people,” she says. “It almost felt like hearing superhero tales.” She reveled in the stories she heard in songs as well, be they Wu-Tang Clan tracks that her older brother played or ballads from Dolly Parton LPs in the family collection. It wasn’t long before she began to write songs herself, composing by voice, then on guitar, then using the banjo that her father gave her when she was in high school. She wrote poetry, too, so well that she was named the national youth poet laureate in 2019-20.Earlier this year, Jackson, 24, released her debut album, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?,” with songs that partake of folk and jazz, blues and rap. Her lyrics layer sound and simile: “I wanna be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine, a loaded gun,” she sings on “No Fun/Party.” Her music is sometimes playful, sometimes searing; above all, it’s story driven, like the nearly eight-minute ballad “Rat,” in which Jackson assumes the role of troubadour from the opening couplet: “Take the story of Rat who’s headed west / His buddy once told him he likes the girls there best.” Memorializing the lives of people both real and real enough for Jackson to imagine is what her music does best. “I love songs that tell stories,” she says. “That’s what folk music is for me.”After composing many of her songs in the isolation of her bedroom during the pandemic, she’s now growing accustomed to playing them for an audience. She recalls a recent performance where the energy was great, but the crowd was mostly white, which left her conflicted. “I am so grateful for anyone who listens to my music,” Jackson says. “But I secretly and very selfishly do want my music to reach my own people. And to prove that this is our music also. It’s not even like I’m doing something subversive. I’m just making the music that we came up with in the first place.” More

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      What Fuels the ‘Manic Creativity’ of Joan Baez

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      The 82-year-old singer and subject of a new documentary sleeps in a tree, has come to terms with not being a reader and is more interested in upside down than right side up.About seven years ago, Joan Baez — singer, activist, icon — decided she was ready.“I wanted to do what I called an honest legacy,” she said. “Then I realized that to do that, I had to really give up a lot of control over my personal stuff.”That meant opening up the meticulously sorted archive of family movies, recordings, photos and journal entries that her mother maintained. In the documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” which was released in October, Baez lays eyes on the trove at the same moment as viewers.“I just kind of gawked at it in astonishment,” Baez, 82, said. Each time she watches the documentary, “there’s something revelatory,” she added. “It’s been a major learning experience for me.” Baez told us about some of the people, places, activities and music that have fueled the “manic creativity” she’s now experiencing.1DancingI dance in the morning when I get up, on and off through the day, and have a Zoom dance with friends one night a week. We can start at 6 p.m. and quit at 7, instead of starting at 10 and dancing until I drop, which I realize was not that much fun after all, as I am no longer 30 and everything began hurting.2Drawing Upside DownUpside down is far more interesting to me than right side up. Things otherwise not available to my conscious mind become obvious when I turn the drawing right side up and see what it’s telling me. It can take the place of doodling, though not necessarily. Doodling has its place.3A Certain TreeI sleep in my big oak tree most nights in the summer. I have a platform 20 feet up, held in place by ropes and bamboo. There’s a ladderlike stair which is way too steep. Having fallen from it once, I now use a climbing harness to get up and down — so my friends won’t live in a constant state of panic and have to try and hide the panic from me. So I won’t worry that they are worried, and we don’t have to talk about it, and I can just get on with my life. The tree is named Frank. He named himself.4Writing PoetrySince I quit touring four years ago, I have been in a state of manic creativity: portrait painting, drawing, making prayer sticks, making a documentary and last but not least, finishing up a book of poetry which will be released in the spring. It’s called “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” The title poem is a fantasy story of my mother falling in love with a Swedish opera singer, Jussi Bjorling, and him falling for her.5Music I Have Listened to ForeverJussi Bjorling, the sopranos Joan Sutherland and Kathleen Ferrier, the pianists Glenn Gould and Maurizio Pollini, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz are among the classical favorites I listen to. For nonclassical music I depend on the Gipsy Kings; selected country and western music like Lauren Duski and Sturgill Simpson for the voice; Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash for the soul. I like to put Leonard Cohen on Spotify and see which of my friends and colleagues show up in Spotify’s interpretations. And I’ll listen to anything at all by Andrea Bocelli.6Collecting Eggs From My Beloved ChickensA fresh egg is a gift from God. Did you know that when it comes out it’s wet? Like a newborn elephant, or sparrow. Or you, or me.7AudiobooksI am a nonreader and now can depend on audiobooks to both entertain and educate me. My favorite book of the last 10 years is “A Gentleman in Moscow,” with “Bel Canto” running a close second. People give me books to read and I just smile blankly and say thank you, and wish I were a reader. I know I’m missing a world of treasures.8Making Good TroubleI know about the pendulum theory — politics swing left to right, imperfect democracy to fascism — but no one could have predicted the current wrecking ball. What to do about it? Keep your head up, or down if you are passing the Proud Boys on the street, and make good trouble wherever and whenever you can.9BirdsongOf all the animals and birds which are now disappearing by the billions, I feel closest to the songbirds. They are, after all, my family. My advice is to listen to one bird sing its glorious song — listen hard and treasure it, and no longer expect a chorus.And then go help someone clean up a river.10My SonHe is uniquely funny and can make me laugh as few people can. I’ve given him permission to leave the room when I’m on my deathbed and say, “[Expletive], I wish she’d just get on with it, because she’s driving everybody nuts!” Gabe doesn’t read much either, so he probably won’t see this. More

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      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

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      An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More

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      Mr Eazi’s Anthem of Gratitude, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Silvana Estrada, Old Dominion, Nadine Shah and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.​​Mr Eazi featuring Soweto Gospel Choir, ‘Exit’Mr Eazi — born in Nigeria and long based in Ghana — has been releasing singles and mixtapes for a decade, becoming one of Africa’s major hitmakers. But he considers his new album, “The Evil Genius,” his official studio debut, tracing a narrative that reaches its finale with “Exit.” The track, produced by the Nigerian studio mastermind Kel-P, merges Nigerian Afrobeats and South African gospel, as Mr Eazi sings about how the paranoia of success — “I’ve seen things go bad/When my family turns to demons around me” — gets overcome by gratitude and faith. The Soweto Gospel Choir harmonizes with worshipful, call-and-response thank yous. JON PARELESNadine Shah, ‘Topless Mother’Loud guitars over a pounding Bo Diddley beat propel Nadine Shah’s vocals through “Topless Mother,” a burst of determined, free-associative, syllabically perfect semi-sequiturs. “I told you all/That I have heard,” she sing-chants. “And do you promise not to breathe a word.” She also blurts out three-syllable rhymes: “Sinatra, Viagra, iguana.” Both words and music are all about brusque momentum and a determination to connect. PARELESFlyte featuring Laura Marling, ‘Tough Love’“This could be real — tough love,” the not-exactly folky duo Flyte sings, in a track from its self-titled new album that starts out with typical folk-rock strumming and harmonies and grows into an avalanche. Will Taylor and Nick Hill sing about self-contradictory behavior — “How do we start healing if we can’t keep out the dark” — while the track swells in a giant crescendo. An intimate conflict becomes an existential struggle. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Qué Problema’The problem in “Qué Problema” (“What a Problem”) is a rapturous infatuation, verging on the mystical, that may never be fulfilled. “Your skin has the color of time,” sings the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada. “When you smile, the wind stumbles.” A swaying, flickering rhythm, with a six-beat undercurrent that’s sometimes only implied, carries a vocal that radiates affection, no matter how things turn out. PARELESLulu. featuring the Joy, ‘Yesterdays’Lulu. — a Nigerian-British songwriter, Lulu Ayodele, who’s unlikely to be confused with the 1960s Scottish hitmaker Lulu — works her way from self-doubt to cautious optimism in “Yesterdays.” She sings, “I know I’m changing/I know there is beauty where pain is.” Subdued Afrobeats percussion and diffident guitar picking captures her uncertainty, but the Joy — a South African vocal group, singing in English and Zulu — coaxes her to move ahead, insisting, “Now I found a better place.” PARELESSheherazaad, ‘Mashoor’Sheherazaad, an Indian-American songwriter from San Francisco, draws on microtonal South Asian vocal inflections, Minimalism and hints of flamenco in “Mashoor” (“Fame”), which was produced by another South Asian hybridizer, Arooj Aftab. Singing in Hindi, accompanied only by a meditative classical guitar and hand percussion, Sheherazaad interrogates unearned fame, pondering, “Have you climbed too high?/Where is my reflection in the mirror?” PARELESOld Dominion, ‘Beautiful Sky’Smokey Robinson — who co-wrote “The Way You Do the Things You Do” — might appreciate “Beautiful Sky,” which hijacks standard honky-tonk images into self-pitying analogies for a failed romance: “The way you go to my head, you’d make a really good tequila/The way you’re always on, you’d make a damn good neon light.” Fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars gather behind Old Dominion’s close-harmony vocals, and of course that “Beautiful Sky” feels blue. PARELESThe Third Mind featuring Jesse Sykes, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Victor Krummenacher and David Immerglück from Camper Van Beethoven and Michael Jerome from Better Than Ezra get together as the Third Mind to enjoy psychedelic jams. They found an ideal vehicle with “Sally Go Round the Roses,” the mysterious one-hit wonder by the Jaynetts, who sang, “The saddest thing in the whole wide world/is to see your baby with another girl.” The song has also been picked up by Grace Slick, Tim Buckley and the English folk-jazz group Pentangle. It’s a modal, Celtic-flavored tune, mostly a drone, and the Third Mind’s guitar colloquies connect it to Appalachia, the Byrds and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jesse Sykes’s vocals sound frayed and knowing; the guitars tease, probe, tangle and palpitate. PARELESHauschka, ‘Altruism’Volker Bertelmann, the composer who performs as Hauschka — and who won an Academy Award for the score of “All Quiet on the Western Front” — plays piano both on the keyboard and inside on the strings directly. He also uses a prepared piano, with damping and resonating objects on the strings, along with other acoustic and electronic sounds. In “Altruism,” from his new album “Philanthropy,” Hauschka layers terse little riffs and plinking, clanking, rattling tones into something like funk, with a marchlike melody emerging briefly before the track calmly disassembles itself. PARELESRoy Nathanson featuring Nick Hakim, ‘All the Bones Had Names’During the pandemic, the saxophonist, poet, educator and activist Roy Nathanson, 72, convened jam sessions in front of his Brooklyn home for 82 straight days with whichever musicians assembled on the sidewalk that evening. He has funneled the experience into “82 Days,” a scruffy and enchanting new record. “All the Bones Had Names” began with a poem, written when he was getting a somber drumbeat of news about death: of family members, close friends and essential workers living in the neighborhood. Over a droning electric bass and splatters from an un-fancy keyboard, Nathanson reads the poem while the vocalist Nick Hakim, his frequent musical partner, adds a smokescreen of ad-libs. “All the bones had names/no one claimed,” the poem begins. But by the end, Nathanson is refusing to see death as an endpoint. “The bones were stars,” he says, “that had yet/to be discovered.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJ.D. Allen, ‘The Knight of Swords’Since 2011, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen has released an album a year, typically with a trio. But don’t confuse habit with stillness. His most recent LP, “This,” is Allen’s first full-on encounter with electronics, and it is the sound of a burly toned, bop-steeped saxophonist pushing beyond the familiar. On “The Knight of Swords,” two independent histories seem to circle each other, seeking common ground, as Allen’s spiraling, bittersweet blues meets the ghostly swell of Alex Bonney’s electronics. RUSSONELLOKevin Sun, ‘After Depths’The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety. Sun is not shy about his appreciation for Mark Turner, a shadow-dwelling tenor great one generation his senior, and one way to hear his double LP “The Depths of Memory” is as a callback to the sort of bendable postmodernism that Turner was playing with his Fly Trio back in the early 2000s (and that he’s continued making for ECM Records, in other formats). But Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time. Leading a quintet here, Sun concludes the album with “After Depths,” a slow-motion action painting with a melody that could almost pass for spontaneous — if it weren’t being doubled with such precise imperfection by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. RUSSONELLO More

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      My Haul From the WFMU Record Fair

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      Rounding out a record collection with finds from the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk and Roberta Flack.Scenes from a great day album shopping in Queens.Lindsay ZoladzDear listeners,Over the weekend, I spent some time at the WFMU Record and CD Fair — a New York institution returning in person for the first time since 2019. A fund-raiser for the great, listener-supported radio station, this year’s Record Fair featured over 100 dealers hawking vinyl and other musical sundries at the Knockdown Center in Queens. I browsed for hours, and by the time I was done my back was sore from hunching over crates and my arms ached from all the records I was toting around. Who says record collecting isn’t a sport?That lingering pang in my shoulder, though, meant I left with a pretty decent record haul — which I used to create today’s playlist.Some people go to record fairs ready to drop big bucks on rare finds and coveted collectibles. That wasn’t my aim, though: I was in it for the cheap thrills and spontaneous discoveries. I found, for example, a fantastic, good-as-new-condition Ike & Tina Turner live album I’d never heard, at a stand where most records were marked down to 50 percent off in the event’s final hours. (Given that deal, I threw in a copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s scuzzy classic “You’re Living All Over Me” at the last minute, too.) For $5 or less, I acquired records by Bob Dylan and Roberta Flack.But I also learned about the perils of the discount bin. When I added a $3 copy of Waylon Jennings’s “Greatest Hits” to my pile, I thought I’d checked the condition of the LP. But apparently I hadn’t looked at the label. For when I pulled it out of its sleeve yesterday and went to play it, I found that I was actually in possession of … Neil Diamond’s “12 Greatest Hits, Volume II.” Talk about a rude awakening.Overall, though, the fair was a blast, and an opportunity to connect with record sellers in a setting way more personable than ordering something off Discogs. Each stall had its own style and personality quirks — like the one graciously offering a questionably large bowl of free “I More

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      Victor Jara Killing: Ex-Chilean Soldier Arrested in Florida

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      Pedro Barrientos, 74, is accused of killing the popular Chilean singer in 1973. In a civil case, Mr. Barrientos was accused of bragging about shooting Mr. Jara twice in the head.A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara and others during the bloody aftermath of a 1973 military coup was arrested in Florida, officials announced Tuesday.The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is wanted in Chile for the extrajudicial murder of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports stadium. There, Mr. Jara and other dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the country’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power.Federal immigration officials and local law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, according to a news release published on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officials said.“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, said in the news release.Mr. Jara, who has been described as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a popular singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.He had supported the Allende government and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested at the State Technical University alongside hundreds of students and faculty members.Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found outside a cemetery alongside those of four other victims. Before he was killed, soldiers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly told him that he would never play guitar again.Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes more than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case found him liable for Mr. Jara’s death and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s family, which had brought the case under a federal law that allows the victims of overseas human rights violations to seek redress.A former Chilean soldier testified in court that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice in the head.“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.A federal court revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July based on a sealed complaint brought by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation office.“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news release said.It was unclear whether extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos were underway. The federal authorities could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.Mr. Barrientos was the latest former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired military officers were each sentenced to more than 15 years in prison by a Chilean judge over Mr. Jara’s death. More

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      ‘Joan Baez I Am a Noise’ Review: Fountain of Nostalgia

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      A new documentary about the folk singer and activist Joan Baez contains a gold mine of archival materials.In a letter to her parents, the singer Joan Baez describes the work of recalling repressed memories of being abused by her father as “the bone-shattering task of remembering.”Her account of that experience, which she says her parents denied, is shown in the new documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise.” In the wistfully immersive film — directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle — Baez reveals these “bone-shattering” secrets while winding down her 60-year career as a musician and political activist.At 82, Baez seems to have processed her struggles. She is plain-spoken about her early fame and her devotion to Bob Dylan, and does not let herself off the hook when her son admits to feeling her absence while she was “busy saving the world.”The documentary has a gold mine of material: drawings and journal entries, concert footage, family videos and vintage photographs. Included in the mix is audio from one of her therapy tapes, setting the stage for her unflinching confessional about abuse.As Baez rediscovers many of these items in her mother’s storage unit, her memories come alive, as if we are with her on this journey. O’Connor, Navasky and O’Boyle make imaginative visual choices to give Baez a full cinematic dimensionality, such as animating her sometimes haunting sketches.There is ultimately a sense of resolve for Baez in “I Am a Noise.” And for the rest of us, the documentary is an eloquent meditation on making peace with the past.Joan Baez I Am a NoiseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More