American Song

Joe Hines

America was meant to be a light on the hill — a place others looked to when they needed to find their own way forward. If America has ever truly been that light, it came from its music. From the people who suffered the most and somehow still found something worth singing about. From colonial taverns to protest marches in the Eastern Bloc, from gospel churches to a ghetto in Soweto, American rhythms helped people band together, speak truth, and refuse to quit. Our songs became the world's songs — not because we exported them, but because people who needed hope reached out and claimed them as their own. American Song tells the stories of the artists who made the music and the people who were moved by it. One era at a time. One genre, one band, one song at a time. Music that started by campfires, in cotton fields, in churches and juke joints — and moved out into the world to become something larger than any one nation could contain. This is American Song.

  1. MAR 19

    New Wave — Up From the Ooze (How Kraftwerk, CBGB, and a Twelve-Foot Room on the Bowery Accidentally Invented the Future)

    Get in touch! Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from the murk and becoming something the world had never seen before. Scientists call it the Cambrian Explosion. It was the moment life stopped playing it safe. Rock music had its own Cambrian moment. And like the original, it happened in the dark, in conditions nobody would have designed on purpose, among creatures that looked like nothing that had come before. This is the first episode of American Song: New Wave — a new series tracing the origins, explosions, and enduring legacy of the genre that turned anxiety into an art form, made nervousness a fashion statement, and somehow got America dancing to songs about the end of the world. In this episode: Kraftwerk emerges from postwar Düsseldorf like something that evolved independently of everything else — precise, alien, and more perfectly adapted to the future than anything sharing its environment. The Ramones reduce rock to its purest possible form and discover that what's left is still everything. Television proves that minimalism and virtuosity are not opposites. And Patti Smith walks into a twelve-foot room on the Bowery and claims the entire territory of rock and poetry for herself, without asking anyone's permission, because it hadn't occurred to her that permission was required. New Wave didn't descend from the mainstream. It crawled up from somewhere older and stranger and more alive — from musicians too weird, too restless, or too furious to stay in the shallows. This is where it started. This is the murk. Music In This Episode Peter Gabriel: IntruderKraftwerk: AutobahnKraftwerk: Trans Europ ExpressGary Numan: CarsThe Feelies: The Boy With the Perpetual NervousnessRamones: I Wanna Be SedatedRamones: Beat on the BratRamones: I Wanna Be Your BoyfriendTelevision: See No EvilTelevision: Marquee MoonPatti Smith: GloriaBlondie (Rhythm Only): One Way Or AnotherB-52's: Rock Lobster Interviews Ralf Hutter (Kraftwerk)Hilly Krystal (CBGB's)Marky Ramone (Ramones)Tom Verlaine (Television)Patti Smith (Patti Smith) Next episode: Blondie. Talking Heads. Devo. The B-52s. Oingo Boingo. New Wave goes national — and it turns out the whole country had been waiting. Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    1h 2m
  2. JAN 27

    The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (2)

    Get in touch! Part 2 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.  But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim that those rarified few received?  What is it within a songwriter that drives their art and compells them to write, even if they're not filling stadiums, or winning Grammy's (questionnable why some of the folks who do receive them deserved it!).  I've been fortunate to share many road miles with one of these artists for most of my life, and in today's episode, I introduce him to you.  In 1995, LA Time music critic, Mike Boehm, said this about Mark's first album: "The two albums I couldn’t stop listening to in ’95 were a tie for the number-one position in my Top Ten. [One of these was] Mark Davis, “You Came Screaming”. Davis’ first album is graced by superb melodies and hall-of-fame influences. His intensely realized subject is the embattled condition of idealism in a fallen world."   Other music critics have said this: "Getting at large truths with songs full of human-scale detail and unsentamentalized beauty.  - Los Angeles Times  “Davis is truly a master of his craft… able to lift spirits even while supporting the weight of the world.” - Orange County Register  I hope you'll listen closely to this two part episode. I have a special feeling that when you do, you just might come to love this music and appreciate this artistic soul as much as I do. Learn more about Mark Davis and support his music through these links: https://songrites.com/mark-davis-and-the-inklings https://markdavisinklings.bandcamp.com Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    1h 7m
  3. JAN 27

    The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (1)

    Get in touch! Part 1 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.  But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim that those rarified few received?  What is it within a songwriter that drives their art and compells them to write, even if they're not filling stadiums, or winning Grammy's (questionnable why some of the folks who do receive them deserved it!).  I've been fortunate to share many road miles with one of these artists for most of my life, and in today's episode, I introduce him to you.  In 1995, LA Time music critic, Mike Boehm, said this about Mark's first album: "The two albums I couldn’t stop listening to in ’95 were a tie for the number-one position in my Top Ten. [One of these was] Mark Davis, “You Came Screaming”. Davis’ first album is graced by superb melodies and hall-of-fame influences. His intensely realized subject is the embattled condition of idealism in a fallen world."   Other music critics have said this: "Getting at large truths with songs full of human-scale detail and unsentamentalized beauty.  - Los Angeles Times  “Davis is truly a master of his craft… able to lift spirits even while supporting the weight of the world.” - Orange County Register  I hope you'll listen closely to this two part episode. I have a special feeling that when you do, you just might come to love this music and appreciate this artistic soul as much as I do. Learn more about Mark Davis and support his music through these links: https://songrites.com/mark-davis-and-the-inklings https://markdavisinklings.bandcamp.com Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    1h 6m
  4. 11/09/2025

    Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Part Five - Last Man Standing

    Get in touch! Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway, Western Stars, and Letter to You—projects that ask what kind of ancestor, and what kind of citizen, you want to be when you’re running out of time.  We follow him into those late-career marathon shows and finally to a 2025 European stage, where he calls out a "incompetent, corrupt, and treasonous administration" and then sings about hope, duty, and “we the people” anyway.  This final chapter ties Bruce back to everyone we’ve studied in 2025 on American Song—including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne —and makes the subtext plain: if we want a better America, we’re going to have to live up to the American values embodied in the songs of the artists we say we admire. Music In This Episode: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band My City of RuinsShackled and DrawnRocky GroundSundownHello SunshineLast Man StandingOne Minute You're HereThe Power of PrayerLong Walk HomeWe Shall OvercomeArchival Interviews Rick Rubin/ Malcolm Gladwell Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    46 min
  5. 11/09/2025

    Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Part Four - Breakups, Ghosts, and Trump’s America

    Get in touch! Part Four is where the story cuts close to the bone. Bruce lets the E Street Band go, stares down his own failures on Tunnel of Love, and writes The Ghost of Tom Joad for the people that some Americans prefer not to see: migrants, the unemployed, the left-behind.  The band reunites, “American Skin (41 Shots)” forces a conversation about race and fear, and The Rising and Wrecking Ball turn grief and economic anger into something like a shared civic ritual. We carry all of that forward into Trump’s first administration and Charlottesville, and we hold Bruce’s choices up as a different model of Americanness—one where loving your country means telling it the truth and standing with the people it’s hurting, even when that costs you. Music in This Episode: Bruce Springsteen (With and Without) the E Street Band Tunnel of LoveHuman TouchLiving ProofThe Ghost of Tom JoadTheme from Ken Burns 'The Civil War'*The Price You Pay**American Skin (41 Shots)This Land Is Your LandArchival Interviews Rick Rubin/ Malcolm Gladwell Mark Maron Howard SternBank Street Podcast *As performed by my second cousin, Molly Hines of Wilmington, NC. A massively talented violinist, during our family reunion in Yellowstone National Park; Summer, 2025. Thank you, Molly! Visit https://www.mollyjhines.com/ ** E Street Band backing track; no vocals.  Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    51 min
  6. 11/09/2025

    Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Part Three: Darkness, The River, Nebraska, and Berlin ’88

    Get in touch! Factories closing, marriages cracking, the glitter of the ’80s hiding a lot of hurt—Part 3 lives right in that gap between the American dream and the American day-to-day. Bruce digs into Darkness, The River, and Nebraska, writing about people who rarely get a mic: laid-off workers, young couples in over their heads, neighbors hanging on by their fingernails. Then Born in the U.S.A. turns into a worldwide roar, and politicians try to strip the songs of their doubts and their compassion. We end in East Berlin, 1988, with Springsteen singing to a divided crowd about freedom and walls coming down, and we ask: what if this kind of complicated, honest patriotism was the version we measured ourselves against instead of the cheap, loud kind? Music in this Episode: Bruce Spingsteen (With and Without) the E Street Band I Fought the Law - LiveBadlandsThe Promised LandProve it All Night - Live from Hammersmith Odeon. 1978The Ties That BindThe River album medley: Point Blank/ The River/ Hungry Heart/ Cadillac Ranch/ I'm a Rocker/ Drive All NightAtlantic CityJohnny 99Born in the USABorn in the USA Nebraska era demoDownbound TrainDancing in the DarkChimes of Freedom - Live in East Berlin 1988Archival Interviews Letter to You era interviewNPR/ Loren Anki - Born in the USANPR/ Terry Gross Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook. There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

    52 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

America was meant to be a light on the hill — a place others looked to when they needed to find their own way forward. If America has ever truly been that light, it came from its music. From the people who suffered the most and somehow still found something worth singing about. From colonial taverns to protest marches in the Eastern Bloc, from gospel churches to a ghetto in Soweto, American rhythms helped people band together, speak truth, and refuse to quit. Our songs became the world's songs — not because we exported them, but because people who needed hope reached out and claimed them as their own. American Song tells the stories of the artists who made the music and the people who were moved by it. One era at a time. One genre, one band, one song at a time. Music that started by campfires, in cotton fields, in churches and juke joints — and moved out into the world to become something larger than any one nation could contain. This is American Song.