Tony Scherman

Tony Scherman is the author of Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (Smithsonian; Da Capo paperback), about one of the fathers of rock ’n’ roll.

Articles by this Author

When Pop Turned the Art World Upside Down, February/March 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 1

Andy Warhol and friends oversaw the death of a centuries-old tradition and the birth of the postmodern.

A Neglected Classic Called "American Humor", December 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 8

The Omni-American, September 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 5

ALBERT MURRAY SEES AMERICAN CULTURE AS AN incandescent fusion of European, Yankee, frontier, and black. And he sees what he calls the “blues idiom” as the highest expression of that culture.

What is Jazz?, October 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 6

Wynton Marsalis believes that America is in danger of losing the truest mirror of our national identity. If that’s the case, we are at least fortunate that, today, jazz’s foremost performer is also its most eloquent advocate.

Country, November 1994 | Vol. 45, No. 7

It’s the fastest-growing music in America. It’s a three-billion-dollar-plus industry. Cable stations devoted to it reach 62,000,000 homes. And yet, says one passionate follower of country music past and present, its story is over.

The Very Best Country-music Albums, November 1994 | Vol. 45, No. 7

A Personal Choice

“He Is the Original Rock’n’Roll Guy”, July/August 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 4

How Robert Johnson showed the way to Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and a whole generation of musicians

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

John Brown: Madman or Supremely Sane?

A new book reevaluates the still-controversial insurrectionist. The picture of John Brown that has come down through time is largely that of a madman, a fanatic. The leader of the failed 1859 raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, who hoped to touch off a massive slave rebellion, was…

2006-09-01

Happy Birthday, Porgy

In the 1920s and early ’30s, while turning out an unbroken string of hit songs (“Swanee,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You”) and musicals (Lady Be Good!, Oh Kay!, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing), George Gershwin was charting a second course, as a composer of concert works in which he would…

2006-10-10

Roger Maris: Home Run King or Not?

Forty-five years ago, on October 1, 1961, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees smacked his sixty-first home run of the season, surpassing his fellow Yankee Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60. Ruth’s mark had stood for 34 years; Maris’s lasted for 37. Both how he got it and how he lost…

2006-10-02

America’s Best Ear for Music

John Hammond was the twentieth century’s greatest discoverer of popular musical talent, from Billie Holiday in 1933 to Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1982, with Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen in between. Nobody else in the music business ever had a string…

2006-08-22

Featured Authors

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.