On today’s Fresh Air: remembering Doc Watson. You can download his interviews on Fresh Air in 1988 and 1989 right here.

nprmusic:

RIP Levon Helm. The 71-year-old lost a battle with cancer when he died Thursday afternoon in New York City. 

All Things Considered contributor Will Hermes remembers seeing the legendary drummer and singer at a roadhouse in Minneapolis: “It was like seeing the Rockies or the Grand Canyon.”

Photo: Jan Persson/Referns

Levon Helm: The 2007 Fresh Air Interview

dshooker:

Mike Wallace interviews Salvador Dali, 1958 (Part 2)

Mike Wallace on Fresh Air, 2005.

Here’s the audio from a 2008 rebroadcast of Terry’s conversation with Etta James. This will be updated next week for the on-air obituary but I thought it was worth sharing now, too. (It sounds dated at first because it ran in conjunction with a movie release.)

Etta James: The 1994 Fresh Air Interview

braiker:

Paul Motian played on my favorite Keith Jarrett records. Here they are in Germany in 1972, with Charlie Haden on bass (which you can barely hear here). Great, joyful stuff. RIP.

Fresh Air Remembers Drummer Paul Motian

“When she hit her high E-flat at the end of Lucia’s famous Mad Scene, my friend’s eyes popped, to the point where he spent the last scene of the opera on all fours searching for his contact lenses. Sutherland had that kind of voice. If you cared primarily about extraordinary vocal qualities, then Sutherland was probably your favorite singer. And, for some years, she was mine. I practically wore out my copy of her famous 1960 double-LP tribute to the great sopranos of the past, The Art of the Prima Donna.” (From classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz’s appreciation of opera singer Joan Sutherland, who died earlier this week.)

We remember NBC broadcaster Edwin Newman. Newman, on the importance of language: “I thought that it was the business of anybody in the news business to examine what he or she was told. And you cannot do that — you cannot examine what is being told and judge its veracity — unless you understand language, particularly unless you understand when language is being used in an attempt to mislead you. I took that very seriously.” (Photo: AP)