Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, a combination of jazz, funk, and Nigerian percussion styles. It was also a political force, a propulsive delivery system of Fela's revolutionary ideas, pitched against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. His influence helped bring a tilt towards democracy in Nigeria and promoted Pan-Africanist politics to the world. The power and potency of Fela's music and message...

Written by Woody Guthrie in 1940, "This land is your land" is one of the United States' most famous songs. Its Oklahoma-born author, Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie, was a complex, multi-talented man whose songs would come to exemplify that strain of American music. Yet his life was a tangle of unresolved contradictions: an indifferent guitar player yet an accomplished musician; three times married, but a perennially unfaithful husband; distant or...