With nearly 1,500 Broadway performances, six Tony Awards, more than three million albums sold, and five Academy Awards, The Sound of Music, based on the lives of Maria, the baron, and their singing children, is as familiar to most of us as our own family history. But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold. Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with...

From the Publisher: A true American original is brought to life in this rich and lively portrait of Pete Seeger, who, with his musical grace and inextinguishable passion for social justice, transformed folk singing into a high form of peaceful protest in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on his extensive talks with Seeger, New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson lets us experience the man's unique blend of independence and commitment, charm,...

"Peggy Seeger is one of folk music's most influential artists and songwriters. Born in New York City in 1935, she enjoyed a childhood steeped in music and left-wing politics - they remain her lifeblood. After college, she traveled to Russia and China - against US advice - before arriving in London, where she met the man with whom she would raise three children and share the next thirty-three years: Ewan MacColl. Together, they helped lay the foundations...

Born into folk music's first family, Peggy Seeger has blazed her own trail artistically and personally. Jean Freedman draws on a wealth of research and conversations with Seeger to tell the life story of one of music's most charismatic performers and tireless advocates. Here is the story of Seeger's multifaceted career, from her youth to her pivotal role in the American and British folk revivals, from her instrumental virtuosity to her tireless work...

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...

In 1997, having failed to release a single new song in seven long years, Dylan put out the equivalent of two albums in a single package. He called it 'Time Out of Mind'. So began the renaissance, artistic and personal, that culminated in 2012's acclaimed 'Tempest'. In the concluding volume of his groundbreaking study, Ian Bell explores the unparalleled second act in a quintessentially American career. It is a tale of redemption, of an act of creative...

"In this new book, we hear directly from the artist through the widest array of sources -- letters, notes to himself, published articles, rough drafts, stories, and poetry -- creating the most detailed picture available of Seeger as a musician, an activist, and a family man, in his own words and from his own perspective ... The portrait that emerges is not a saint, not a martyr, but a flesh-and-blood man, struggling to understand his gift, his time,...